David Seddon interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 19th February 2009

0:09:07 Born in Blackheath, London, in 1943; the clinic where I was born was run by Drs Pink and White who were vegetarians; they seemed to have an enormous impact on the women who gave birth there as my mother was very keen that I should be brought up as a vegetarian; curiously, I now find myself the owner of a flat in Blackheath, a curious cycle; only one of my grandparents was living when I was born; my mother's parents had both died young and so had my father's father; I remember my paternal grandmother as an elderly lady with a stick, which I tried to steal from her; remember visiting her at a home in Yorkshire which disturbed me as it seemed so cold; both my parents were born in Yorkshire and came down to London just before the War in 1939; my father was a physicist and had been a lecturer at Sheffield; my mother had left school at thirteen and had worked first in a factory, then done clerical work; they came to London as my father was offered a job as Director of Research with United Glass, a manufacturer with a factory on the Thames; my mother died in 2004 at the age of ninety-eight; I started writing about her life and in so doing have gone back in time and have found out more about my grandparents and back to the 1850s; my mother had an enormous influence on me; my father came from a professional family although he was the first to go to university but my mother's family background was different; her father had been a craftsman but very poor, so they were an odd mixture; my father, who died when I was eight, had a dry sense of humour but was austere and serious; my mother was always the life and soul of the party, entertaining and talkative, but also enormously warm and loving; I was their only child, so when my father died, my mother and I were a unit for many years, so it is not surprising that she is a very central figure, to whom I owe enormous gratitude for the way she encouraged me to go off and do things; she gave me confidence which has helped throughout my life; she followed my studies and whatever I was doing she tried to keep up with in some way; remember my mother's unhappiness after my father died, also the fact that we had no money except debts; my mother had never been trained to do anything but she had to go out to work, learned to drive a car and was very busy all the time; however she still found energy for me, and was a constant companion as well as a parent; unfortunately it was a very one-sided relationship as she felt I wasn't really interested in what she did; she recalled a sadness about this in her letters and diaries, so she led a selfless kind of existence feeding and nourishing me; my father having gone to university and having been head of Batley Grammar School, wanted me to have every benefit; he had hoped that I would go to a well-known private school, in fact he had Westminster in mind; by his death he had already got me into Westminster Under School and I had started going; when he died there was no money; my mother's family suggested she went back to Yorkshire but she decided to try to make it possible for me to stay in school and fulfil her husband's ambitions, and she did; don't know how she managed to do it but she worked in many jobs, all hours, and took lodgers; eventually I went up to Westminster where I was educated until going to university

9:25:19 At the time the Under School was located in the courtyard where Westminster school is now, in the shadow of Westminster Abbey; remember taking the entrance exam at about seven and a half, and my father and mother accompanying me; remember it was a very hot summer's day and I was expected to do a lot of exam work with other boys in one afternoon; I was accepted and then a year after the Under School was relocated and went to Vincent Square; I used to travel from Blackheath alone; remember that school very well; although I remember teachers I don't remember being particularly inspired by any of them; what I do remember was that the Headmaster was a man who believed in beating; we were shocked when a boy was taken out in front of the class and beaten with a rounders' bat; discipline was kept ultimately by corporal punishment, though I don't know how many of the parents realized or understood this; it continued when I went to Westminster School; I was beaten there and the memory stays vivid as I hate physical violence; you were not allowed into the dormitories during the day but four of us were found there, fooling around; the Housemaster was incandescent and we were taken down solemnly and beaten; it was painful and humiliating, and I had the temerity (at fourteen, as I was) to ask why he was doing this to us; he assumed we had been engaged in some obscene behaviour; from that time on I became rather rebellious and difficult because I found authority of that kind unacceptable; thus, schooldays were not the best of my life; I was a weekly boarder so saw my mother at weekends; I enjoyed the social life of school and being with other boys, enjoyed sport, and there were inspiring teachers; remember the English teacher, Mr Birt, whose lessons were always exciting; I was always good at sport though not outstanding, and enjoyed it; looking back, school was very important but it was a grind and difficult; probably the most difficult thing was that I was quite good at languages - French and German - and wanted to do them; had in mind to be a foreign correspondent or writer; for reasons that still elude me I was told that I couldn't, and my mother was somehow persuaded that I should do classics; I actually took A levels in Latin, Greek and ancient history, which I was not very good at and found difficult; leaving school and going to university was the beginning of an opening up which was revolutionary, and for the first time I was able to do what I wanted

16:19:08 Strangely, music, drama, and politics don't seem to figure at all in my schooling; I played the piano and learned the trumpet but I wasn't very good and it didn't excite me; since then, music has become more important, but I have always been a listener rather than a player; I like everything, from opera to chamber music, but also jazz; I don't write to music although it maybe playing in the background; there was a period when I was involved in a certain amount of theatre, for instance, the Latin play; perhaps I have always enjoyed playing a part in real life, in later life as a lecturer; from childhood was aware that through life we play many parts, and people behave very differently in different circumstances; curious, looking back, that school seemed to pass with me as a passenger; I did not enjoy school much, though I never admitted so to my mother; I managed to get A levels and go to university, but I never shone in any respect; I became politically active later, but not at this time at all; I read a great deal, partly to escape from school; there was a public library near the school where I would go and read Freud and all sorts of bizarre things; I did like the classics when they weren't being taught as a school subject; there was a world outside that intrigued me but I wasn't really part of it; school didn't open up wonderful vistas but seemed to close them down; it gave me a foundation of some kind but life started when I left school

21:23:03 I loved the language in classics, and read Homer in the original, and really enjoyed ancient history; the normal procedure was to go on to Oxford and read classics but I decided not to, but to go to Cambridge and do something like ancient history; I then discovered you could do archaeology and anthropology there and thought it sounded exciting; I applied to Sidney Sussex College where my mother had a friend; I took an open entrance exam and in the general paper, wrote about the balance of nature; I had an interview with the classics don and remember talking about Suetonius; he tried to persuade me to do classics, but I was accepted to do archaeology and anthropology as I had wanted; Cambridge in 1961 was liberating because no one told you what to do; I could go to lectures or not, read recommended texts or not, it seemed very open and flexible; from almost the first day I found it absolutely fascinating - enjoyed the archaeology, the physical anthropology and the social anthropology; at the end of the first year I had enormous difficulties in deciding which of these three I wanted to do; I enjoyed living in College, I was able to get into the football and cricket teams, I rowed for the College; the next two years were the same; I remember friends from the College; in the first year I shared rooms with David Hayes, who was reading law; he had a good tenor voice and would sing arias from Puccini to entertain me, and we had very good conversations; in the vacation between our first and second year, David and I and two other friends drove across Europe, through Turkey and into Iran; David incidentally is now a Circuit Judge in North Norfolk; I specialized in the second and third year in archaeology but I do remember the lecturers in the other two subjects in my first year; in anthropology, in which I specialized afterwards, the notable figures were Meyer Fortes, the Professor, and Edmund Leach, then Reader; the opposing views of descent theory and alliance theory, and different views of kinship and marriage were heightened when you found that Edmund Leach was lecturing in one lecture theatre and Meyer Fortes in another, both criticizing each others views implicitly and explicitly; I tried to listen to both but I found Leach's lectures more entertaining and exciting because he was a very good lecturer; at the time alliance theory and Levi-Strauss were the things which linked to structuralism and a whole set of ideas which descent theory seemed not to have; I remember Jack Trevor who used to lecture in biological anthropology whose lectures became increasingly difficult to follow in the years that I was there; Reo Fortune was also lecturing and also rather difficult to understand; most of what we knew about him was his relationship with Margaret Mead and others; I chose archaeology as I was very much excited by the earliest archaeology, so opted for prehistory; Charles McBurney was my supervisor and Eric Higgs, and these two became very important figures in my working life; in the second summer I was privileged to be selected as one of a team to go with Charles McBurney to Iran to look for the origins of homo sapiens; I was chosen partly because I could drive a Land Rover, but I was the only undergraduate in the team; we drove mainly in the north-east of Iran and McBurney had a theory that homo sapiens and Neanderthal man came together in Western Europe but that homo sapiens came from further east; what we found were remnants of Neanderthal in the caves where we dug; Charles had a squeaky voice and was subject to constant imitation and he had made his reputation by digging an enormous cave in Libya; he was quite sharp and acerbic and could be quite unpleasant at times, but he was extraordinarily excited by his subject, and to me this was what mattered; he got us enthusiastic about flints; remember in Iran digging through layers of the most beautiful pottery but he told us to keep digging to get down to the prehistoric; archaeology is about imagination, and rather like reading the classic literature, you could see into another world; during an Easter vacation we dug somewhere on the Gower peninsula, sitting in a cave, digging up not just bones and stones, but mammoths' teeth and the remnants of animals that had clearly been around at that time; suddenly it was very easy to think of yourself as a prehistoric man; this ability to recreate an imagined past was what appealed to me; later, when I actually became an archaeologist this began to pall as I realized that you could construct an enormous range of possible social situations on the basis of very little which I then found unsatisfactory; at the end of my third year Charles was very keen for me to do research and offered me exciting possibilities which I turned down at that point; when I left Cambridge, instead of going to look for the origins of early man in South Iran, I chose to take a job teaching archaeology in Cape Town

36:30:11 I had developed no interest in politics during my time in Cambridge as all happened because of South Africa; I remember hearing John Selwyn Gummer in the Conservative Society and being very impressed; I also went to hear people speak at the Labour Society, and almost joined the Liberal Democrats, so you can see I was nowhere politically; I think I was very aware what was happening; I liked Harold Wilson and was quite impressed by his knowledge and ability, but was not politically active; again, it was a sort of continuation of school in the sense that my involvement in other areas of life seemed to have been very limited; I didn't get involved in theatre, played sport as it came, tried fencing and did all sorts of things, but just at college level; the centre of my life was very much my work; I have never talked about religion as it has not been an important part of my life at all; my father was a Baptist and my mother was never anything particular; I do remember at a fairly early age, having come home from Crusaders aged eight or nine, saying I wasn't sure if I believed in God, but it was not a major issue; when I was at Westminster there was a point at which routinely everyone was confirmed in the Abbey, and I refused; I do remember in an R.E. lesson asking the teacher whether, if I didn't believe in God I would go to hell; he said that was a stupid question, and I remember being disturbed by that because I thought that if you were going to take it seriously then this does matter; I think from that moment on I thought I was just not interested; religion was never important, I was very much a pragmatist, a materialist, and maybe this laid the foundation for later inclinations towards a basically materialist approach to life; I think I have always been an atheist though not one who had wanted to pursue it; I get excitement, pleasure and amazement from how the world is, and I don't see the necessity to invent or create an elaborate structure; as a social scientist later on in my life, one of the puzzles has been why people in many cultures feel it important to create elaborate systems of belief in things one can't see, or feel, or touch; an agnostic might be a safer position to take but I think I do know that there is no God, so atheist seems fair enough; I am not a supporter of Dawkins and have found his writings quite tedious after a while as it is almost a fervour; to me there is no fervour, it just isn't an issue; however, I am interested in people and how they think, and in that area I am interested in religion

43:32:06 Before going to university I had spent three months in East Africa doing a whole variety of things, among which I had been involved in some archaeological excavation; Louis Leakey was digging at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania and I worked there for a while, Merrick Poznanski was excavating on the Kagera River and I joined him; I had found Africa exciting; in 1964 there were not many jobs in archaeology in Britain, so I like many of my contemporaries looked for jobs abroad; one of my closest friends, David Calvocoressi, took a job in Ghana; another friend went to Tasmania and I went to South Africa, to the University of Cape Town; I went by boat which took two weeks to get to Cape Town; I was joined by Ray Inskeep as senior lecturer, and for a year I was in the School of African Studies there; that was very exciting in lots of different ways; my arrival was dramatic, at dawn with the sun coming up over Table Mountain, and spectacular to look at; looking down there were just hundreds of black men unloading cargo and a few white men telling them what to do; somehow that was very shocking; I was met at the boat by Ray Inskeep and we drove up to the University where a lot of the students were demonstrating against the introduction of ninety day detention; I remember that also as quite striking; my life in Cambridge had been almost without politics and I had never seen a demonstration; the students were pretty much all white and it was clearly a different world that I was in; over the period of two years that I stayed there, I was transformed and became aware of the politics of Apartheid and of a different kind of society where the divisions were very acute and inescapable; intellectually it was quite challenging; I had to give lectures for the first time; the School of African Studies was very interesting, it was interdisciplinary and Monica Wilson was Head of Department and it was again quite dramatic to have a woman head of department; she had great authority and warmth, and was very welcoming; she was even then an amazingly impressive person; Jack Simon was there, a political scientist, very much involved with actual African politics; from the beginnings the School itself was not just about the study of archaeology, but about anthropology, the Cape and Africa; a totally new environment for me and very exciting; I was a year in Cape Town and again there was a major choice; I had visited the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute in Zambia where a number of important anthropologists had worked, but it was also a centre of archaeology and was interested in the possibility of doing much more field work; at the same time as that came up as a possibility for me, a lectureship at the University of Witwatersrand came up (I was a junior lecturer at Cape Town), so I had a choice; I applied for both but did not get the position at the Rhodes-Livingstone which went to Brian Fagan, but did get an offer at Witwatersrand so I moved up to Johannesburg, with the support of the people in Cape Town and Monica Wilson was my referee; even at that stage I had begun to think that maybe I would not stay in archaeology as I had become more involved in trying to understand South African society, make sense of race and class and issues that were very visible; there I became involved in other things, I taught African night school, and teaching archaeology there was politically exciting as I was teaching about the iron age settlements in the Transvaal before the Dutch arrived; this denied the myth that they had moved into an empty country and suggested that the Africans had a deeper prehistory than was thought; I also gave a series of lectures for the South African Broadcasting Corporation on human evolution and prehistoric development; it seemed straight forward until I started to receive hate mail and realized that I was in a society where what I had taken for granted was contested; the Dutch Reform Church still believed in creation so what I was saying was not acceptable; I was teaching Africans their own history which was controversial, so increasingly I became politically aware; in Johannesburg I shared a house with a number of other young professionals one of whom was the editor of 'Drum', an active multiracial magazine in South Africa, again quite controversial; this was the time of the trial of Nelson Mandela and others, so through people that I knew I became more politically aware; at the end of this I came to the conclusion that I wasn't prepared to spend my life in prehistory but wanted to know more about race, class, and how South Africa had developed in the way it had; through this time I also had a very important relationship with a young woman who was an anthropologist and was planning to do an M.A. in Chicago, Renée Hirschon, whose father was Jewish; through her I also became more politicised; she had had an African boyfriend, which was a pretty startling thing to do, who was Archie Mafeje; he later became quite a major militant, both in South Africa and elsewhere; thus everything changed my view of what was important and I began to cast around for how I would pursue this; she was keen that I go to Chicago, but I also applied to the L.S.E. to do a Masters in race relations; found I could get a scholarship in London but was not sure I could get the money to support me in Chicago, so went to the L.S.E.; a lot of people at Wits were very cross that I was leaving archaeology but I explained that this was what I wanted to do; the upshot was that I left South Africa in 1966; my mother had been out to South Africa but I was also influenced by the fact that she lived in London

57:09:16 I arrived back at the L.S.E. and found that as there had only been three applicants they were not offering the course; instead of a one year Masters I was offered a two year M.Phil in anthropology, so I registered for it; at that time Tanzania was going through its experimentation in Ujamma under Nyerere and I thought I would like to go there; James Woodburn was the man who knew about Tanzania so I was assigned to him; James was interested in hunters and gatherers and not really interested in race and class; for about six months I read voraciously on Africa and Tanzania in particular, and about African socialism; the next stage was to apply to do fieldwork but was told by the Tanzanian Embassy that I was not eligible for a visa, so could not get in because I had lived for two years in South Africa; I was frustrated, having given up a job, and living at home with my mother; out of the blue an American political scientist, Bob Holt, arrived at the L.S.E. and was looking for a research student to offer a fellowship to do some research for him in Morocco; desperate at this stage, and running out of money, I decided to apply; he was offering two places and had a thesis about development and change; he gave me one of the fellowships and the choice of working with a Berber-speaking or Arabic-speaking group; chose to learn Arabic as I thought it was more likely to get my into Tanzania eventually

Second Part

0:09:07 Having decided to accept the Morocco offer, talked to James Woodburn who said they would re-register me for a PhD but as he knew nothing about Morocco I should find a different tutor; the obvious person at that time was Ernest Gellner although he was in the sociology department; he became very important to me and was a big influence in many ways; Bob Holt was the sponsor and critical guide to the research; the other post was filled by an Arabic speaker, Raymond Jamous, who was of Iranian-Jewish origin and had been brought up in the Lebanon; he was quite happy to learn Berber; he and I developed a very exciting, interesting relationship in the two years we were working in Morocco; we both went to North-East Morocco and lived about fifteen to twenty miles apart, he working among Berber speakers and I among Arabic speakers; we were trying to explore a thesis - Holt had written a book with a man called Turner, 'The Political Basis of Economic Development', their thesis was that you could distinguish between France and China on the one hand, and England and Japan on the other; whereas in France and China it had always been possible to buy your way into the aristocracy, to convert wealth into political status, in England and Japan that was not possible; as one was obliged to accumulate wealth, this was the foundation in England of the bourgeoisie and in Japan to a similar economic class; think there were enormous problems with the thesis, but Holt's reading on the history of Morocco suggested that whereas the Berbers were able to buy themselves status, that was not possible in the Arab world; he thought we would find that the Arabs were more keen to invest and accumulate whereas the Berbers would spend on displays and largess; we soon felt that the thesis could not be sustained, but we had been funded for two years to do detailed research, I learned Arabic and Raymond, Tamazight; at the end of it I had the material for a good PhD thesis; rather like going to South Africa, it was a turning point, confronting a totally different situation, in a society where privacy was really non-existent - very demanding, but very exciting at the same time; before going out to the field there were all the so-called preparations for fieldwork and seminars; I was at the L.S.E. for about six months doing preparatory work; you were there, and there seemed to be an interesting crowd who had come in from other walks of life; particularly remember Nancy Chodorow, Helena Lipstadt, Zoe Woods, Peter Loizos, and a whole range of other people; also the lecturers were interesting, and towering above them for me was Raymond Firth; I found him not only engaging as an individual, but his Friday seminars were always something worth going to; I came across Lucy Mair quite a lot as I had originally worked on African material - a difficult, interesting, problematic person; Isaac Schapera was there, and Maurice Freedman, and bright young sparks like Robin Fox; found this all very stimulating but not exciting enough to provide an overall framework; the fieldwork seminars were very practical so went out to the field without much theory; I found the learning of the language quite straight forward and became pretty fluent within four or five months; I found that I had access to a certain amount of local literature on the region, so found the fieldwork itself very exciting; I had a guiding theory which was not my own to test, but apart from that we were free to construct what we wanted; found myself increasing working on how this group of people had changed over the last hundred years, so an historical analysis of transformation; when I got to Morocco they were just beginning a large program of irrigation which was going to transform the dry plains areas; up till then people had been engaged in farming barley, wheat, and so on as settled farmers; in the period before, when the Spanish had arrived and before that, the people I was working with were mainly pastoralists living in tents, so I had a kind of ready-made picture of what was happening, but that didn't become clear until much later; I talked to old men about what they did when young and their eyes lit up as they described raiding; was able to compare this with Somali literature on the same sort of thing; they became settled agriculturalists during the Spanish era, and now there was the just-emerging irrigated agriculture with the possibility of growing crops for export to Europe; I tried to collect material on all of this; I found that although my Arabic was good, it was much easier to collect information on people's material life - what they were growing, crops, and the social and economic relations around that; politics was more difficult and complex, as were people's ideas and thoughts, and religious beliefs; thus my thesis was very much a materialist analysis; Westermarck was a major figure, and I have written pieces on marriage since, but it wasn't a central feature; I lived for eighteen months in a village which was very exciting and rewarding; you make friends and go back, and live their lives; came back in 1969 to London and found it extremely difficult to re-enter; I had not appreciated how difficult reverse culture shock would be; I was lucky to be able to apply for and get a lectureship in anthropology at SOAS immediately; this meant that I had to start giving lectures and teach, so the process or writing the thesis was made more difficult; I then experienced a major problem with how to structure the material I had; we wrote a report for Holt to show that the people did not conform to the way he suggested, so we completed that work; however, I had a lot of material but no thesis; the process of crafting the material into a thesis took a long time and I did not complete it until 1975; I left SOAS in 1972 to go to East Anglia, and again had teaching responsibilities which also limited my time; on finding a thesis, had come back at a time of political agitation at the L.S.E.; own political radicalization came with the discovery that there were people writing within a conceptual framework that I found increasingly helpful; the first thing I read was Andre Gunder Frank's 'Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America' which Signe Arnfred gave me; it helped me to understand Morocco in its broader context and gave me the beginnings of a framework for looking at my own material; I then discovered some of the French Marxists, like Godelier, Meillassoux, Terray, and a whole number of others writing in the late 1960s, early 1970s, which I read voraciously; I even got so excited that I edited a collection of French works which came out as 'Relations of Production' in 1978; the framework I found was Marxism of a kind that helped me organize my own material in a way that I found very productive; thus in the early 1970s I became a real enthusiast for the Marxist anthropology and thinking that was coming out of France; Maurice Bloch had not yet started on this and in 1971 nothing had been translated; Joel Kahn and Josep Llobera began to work on it in the mid-1970s; my thesis was very heavily influenced by the French Marxists and Gunder Frank

18:05:07 I felt there were very few people who understood this literature; Ernest Gellner was clearly not a Marxist, but he was also somebody who had read and knew what Marxist theory was about and was very intelligent about it, not just a rejectionist; the other person whom I thought had also read and thought about it was Raymond Firth - 'Sceptical Marxist' at least engaged with it, which was more than most anthropologists at that time; then I discovered the whole Manchester School whom I'd not really been aware of despite my time in South Africa, like Gluckman, Turner, and particularly Peter Worsley; they had been writing with an awareness of Marxism which I found very rewarding; through these influences I found a way in which I could write my own material and I think it is one of the few PhD theses of the period that were explicitly Marxist analyses; found Ernest frustrating as a supervisor, I had read most of what he had written, and had a lot of difficulty with his work on the Middle East, 'Saints of the Atlas' in particular, which was clearly the closest to what I was writing about; felt he had produced a rather idealised work which didn't apply to where I was working; so we clashed intellectually at that point; a lot of the early part of my thesis was devoted to a critique of segmentary theory showing that it was one among several kinds of political ideology; it appeared to be a critique of Gellner and  was rather frustrated that he didn't take this on, the feedback was limited; when the thesis was complete he took it away to read; I went down to his house at Petersfield and he met me at the gate, told me he had read it and said I had blown it with all the references to Marx and very little to Gellner; suddenly realized that it was one of his little game plays, but it was a bad moment; he said he didn't agree with it but thought I had handled the subject in an interesting manner; we then had, probably for the first time, a discussion on the material; Talal Asad was my external examiner and the thesis passed, but I had had a huge struggle in creating it; the book 'Moroccan Peasants' which came out of it was not about tribalism or peasants, although the people I worked with called themselves children of the ogress and clearly had a segmentary lineage notion there; the thesis was a major first step into anthropology from archaeology; then, almost as soon as I had got into anthropology I found I was increasingly interested in the sorts of arguments that people like Gunder Frank had developed; I began to realize that what I had struggled with as a thesis was partly because it was so small-scale, and my interests were how the people I had studied were part of a much wider transformation of Morocco and North Africa during the colonial period; when a new school of development studies was set up at East Anglia I applied, because I felt that I was veering towards an interest that went beyond what anthropologists were really interested in; I was then part of a process over the next ten to fifteen years of building a new School of Development Studies at East Anglia, which was multi-disciplinary, in which I found myself; I found the anthropology and even the archaeology with its long-term perspective became very relevant in looking at development; I stayed there until I retired in 2006; although I had a PhD in anthropology I would hesitate to say that I was one, but I am informed in all the work I do by the anthropological approach - critical, sceptical, confrontation with detailed events and actualities at the grass roots - but framed for me in a much broader perspective; now, in retirement, my interest is very much global, in international movements of migration and remittance-flows

27:51:14 My association with Nepal was like so many things in my life, rather by chance; I had arrived at East Anglia with my thesis incomplete; almost as soon as I arrived I was told that the group as a whole had managed to get a big research contract to work in Nepal, but they didn't have an anthropologist; despite coming from a department headed by Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf, with Lionel Caplan and others who were interested in Nepal, I had never been interested in Asia at all; in planning the project I became more involved and eventually I was encouraged to join my colleagues and to go to Nepal; we went in 1974 as a vanguard of four to look at the effects of road building in Western Nepal; I was lucky enough halfway through to take time off to finish my thesis, but was launched in a new endeavour; it was exciting because it was a team project; I was working closely with an agricultural economist (David Feldman), a geographer (Piers Blaikie), an economist (John Cameron), and a little later, a French anthropologist (Alain Fournier); we had quite a large amount of money from the Department of International Development; very soon we felt the impact that people had argued roads should have were wrong; our work was on trying to understand why this should be so, what were the dynamics in the rural areas of Nepal that caused this, and the unexpected impacts that the roads did have; became an attempt to understand the dynamics of a whole rural society; found it extremely exciting as we could almost do as we liked; we fulfilled our terms of reference, but when we wrote our report for the O.D.A. it created a great storm; firstly, it was not what they had expected, secondly, we were very critical about the programme of road building at that stage, and thirdly, it was a much more complicated and multi-faceted analysis that they had anticipated; we had a great battle with them, produced a summary to try to explain what we were arguing about, there were battles within the development group that produced the report as not all our colleagues were in favour of the kind of line we had taken, and it was also formative because, out of the team, three of us could work together and the other two did a different report; eventually we parted ways and the three of us, Blaikie, Cameron, and myself, really thought we had something interesting to say; we revised the report, got agreement from the O.D.A., and got Oxford University Press to publish a reworked version of that fieldwork as 'Nepal in Crisis' in 1980; it had its own impact as the first comprehensive critical analysis that tried to look at Nepal as a whole; we were certainly told by the British Embassy that we were persona non grata, so throughout the 1980s none of us spent much time in Nepal

33:43:16 We both loved and hated being in Nepal; we were living in Pokhara which at that time was not incredibly well-resourced with food and vegetables; we were living there with our families and people got ill a lot; Blaikie's daughter was bitten by a dog and had to have rabies injections, but the team, wandering round the hills were also sick a lot of the time; we had a whole team of Nepalese researchers so it was a very sociable activity unlike my Moroccan experience; in that sense it was rewarding and a valuable intellectual experience; I love working with other people intellectually although it is quite rare to be able to do so; we three were able to work together over a period of ten years although we have gone our separate ways since then; Nepal was the third main place that I had lived in but I don't think it struck me as being particularly different from South Africa or Morocco; it clearly was more complex in many ways than Morocco, partly to do with notions of realities of caste as well as ethnicity, as well as class and social division; we were working on a bigger territory so there was much more difference than in Morocco; I tried to spend as long as I could in particular places but it was never longer than a month; I hope that the anthropological insights and understandings were there; we also had other people's work to draw on whereas there was very little on Morocco that I could use; however, we were the only ones adopting the particular theoretical framework from a Marxist perspective; the work I have done since has been informed by that but have very few colleagues working with the same approach; it is true that it is a materialist analysis, goes against the grain, and assumes a lot of things; think there are problems there but it also has great strength and we thought we could understand the main dynamics of what was happening; what we failed entirely to do was to look outside this region and see the dynamic that was building up outside which led eventually to the Maoist insurgency; ours was a radical pessimistic view at the time, based on the realities we had seen and analysed; in a later book I revised the thinking and it was about ten years later on and did see the parlous state of poverty, and did foresee some sort of political development but not quite the insurgency; it was an exciting place to work and allowed us to debate with Nepalese in a way that I had not been able to with Moroccans; I have written a number of things with Nepali colleagues; Jagannath Adhikari is a man I have great respect for as he is a man who had actually done fieldwork, and the villages he had worked in round Pokhara he knows very well indeed; he and I put together a book that he had begun to write on Pokhara, which again is one of the few on an urban area and its hinterland; I have also worked with him and Ganesh Gurung on labour migration and remittances and we wrote when nobody else seemed to the paying attention to what seemed to me to be the most dramatic change in Nepal's history, with large numbers of people working abroad; remember the IMF people being most surprised and realizing there was more money in the system than they had thought; I have been back to Nepal almost every year, teaching, talking and engaging in debate with Nepalese with a view now to influencing discussions on where things go next

42:16:10 I did a collection of essays with Arjun Karki on the peoples' war in Nepal and out of that has come work on what has life been like in the rural areas during the insurgency where people talk about fear, anxiety and compromise; where things will go now is very hard to say; many of us were very excited in 2006 when the fighting appeared to be coming to an end, and there seemed to be potential for a major transformation; that was two years ago, and although the King's position has been somewhat marginalized, there really doesn't seem to have been the drive or vision among any of the major politicians to force through a process if progressive change; I am very disappointed, there is a great jockeying for positions in a very small arena, and at the same time the situation in Nepal is not radically improving; they don't have a constitution or a unified political command, and nobody is really in control, so Nepal remains in crisis and one can only be hopeful that some sort of coherent alliance comes out to allow them to move forward; I would love to see a Maoist/UML alliance moving forward, without recourse to violence, it is not clear that that is going to happen; there are risks of falling back into a conservative alliance so the future is unclear, meanwhile ordinary Nepalese strive to make a living; they are making no progress in the development field or with tackling the issues of caste and untouchability; turning to the North is something that has happened; in the North-West already those remote areas are closer to Tibet, and there will be structural and infrastructural changes; roads and railways do make a big difference, but that will not be in the next five years which does worry me; the return to some sort of violence will be devastating, but social science is not predictive; this is where the old materialists, like me, suffer, as we think we can perhaps find a clear way to explain how things will happen, although there are still parameters; I am clearer in my mind about how things will go than I was, but I am certainly less optimistic than I was two years ago

47:40:15 One of the ways I found to unblock the difficulties I had with the Moroccan thesis was reading work by people who were beginning to develop what came to be called the world-systems approach; I find that essential now; there are very few parts of the world where you can make sense of what is going on locally without linking it into wider developments; I was very lucky that Andre Gunder Frank came to East Anglia and was a colleague of mine for about four years, and we taught a course together from 1981 onwards called Contemporary World Development; he had written two books on this in about 1980; when he left to go to Amsterdam I continued to direct the Masters programme which taught those courses so was led into thinking much more than I had done about looking at the whole; I taught that for twenty years; an exciting thing was that it took me outside the rather conventional notion that most of my colleagues shared, that development is about the Third World; my course was about three worlds - in America, Russia and Africa - so pretty ambitious; also meant that I extended my own reading and attempted to understand in some way how the whole world was moving; have written on flows of remittances in international terms; clear from Gunder Frank's work that the Second World was being absorbed into the First through banks etc. and by 1989 it was obvious to all of us that State Socialism in the Soviet Union was no longer viable in a political sense; the end of the Second World also suggested this was true of the Third World as well; people like Nigel Harris had foreseen this in the 1980s; thus by the end of the 1980s all are aware that there is one very complicated world; a lot of my work has been in terms of that global dynamic; I have returned more in the last few years to the Middle East as an arena; there was a period when there looked as if there was an emerging challenge to American dominance from Europe and Japan, but in the last ten years the emergence of China and India as major economic powers has made the landscape very different; problem of how to handle the singularity of the world and its complexity, and understand how that plays out in the immediate locality is a huge challenge that not a single discipline is able to deal with; I come back to team work simply because aggregate brain power is greater than singular; am struggling at the moment with the most recent crisis of where the credit crunch came from and why has it taken so many people by surprise; remember the crisis of the 1970s which was like this in reverse where Keynesianism was dead, but now looks as though it is back again; the Obama inauguration is a singular moment for reflection about where the world is going; think it still true that the United States dominates more than any other what happens elsewhere, but it is not a single hegemonic power; we have seen how a single administration can change what happens; the Bush administration has taken the world to war in certain regions in ways that need not have gone that way, where there were real alternatives; the world does depend on the way the new presidency moves and one is optimistic that a group of determined people in the right position can change the world to some extent at least; the trouble is that it doesn't always evolve in the way that they anticipated; I guess I am disappointed as an old Marxist materialist that one can't just see the steps up to heaven through the clouds, but so be it; one recognises that it is just too complicated