Stephen Hugh-Jones interviewed by Alan Macfarlane, 14th February 2007

0:05:05 Introduction; born 20th September 1945 in Poole, Dorset; father one of the major influences in why I became an anthropologisy; father was illegitimate son of Philip Morrell, husband of Lady Ottoline Morrell; he had an odd upbringing in that his father only half accepted his existence; I am called Hugh-Jones because Philip had a son called Hugh by Ottoline at the same time as my father was born; his mother's surname was Jones and when father was young he was called Philip Hugh Jones; when he went to Cambridge his father suggested hyphenating the name; father's mother worked on 'The Nation' (later to merge with 'The New Statesman'); she was on the periphery of the Bloomsbury Group; father is a remarkable person; has always been interested in natural history and was a great traveller; he is just finishing writing his memoirs and thought of calling it 'I used Medicine' as a relection of how he got himself invited to interesting places such as Irianjaya or Oman to give lectures in the medical school and then would go off travelling; went to Ecuador where some American missionaries had been killed by Auca Indians (now called Wuaorani); having cured one of the missionaries, Rachel Saint, he was allowed up to the Auca area where none but missionaries had been before; my childhood and youth was surrounded by Auca spears etc;, father used to take me on animal collecting expeditions and sent me the the Marine Biological Station in Dale Fort, Pembrokeshire; father also went to a Royal Geographical expedition to the Xingu and knew the Villa Boas brothers 

6:35:19 At the age of about seven, father took us to Jamaica; move to create University of the West Indies at the time of decolonization; from seven until eleven I grew up in the university environment on a place called College Common, a paradise for me; spent my time collecting plants and animals and snorkelling on the reefs; for my Cambridge entrance exam I wrote on fish camaflage on a tropical reef using Jamaican venacular names of fish; I was sent to a series of schools there; although not much formal education, learnt to throw stones well which later helped me to become a champion javelin thrower when at school in England; lack of ability in reading, writing and arithmetic at eleven paniced my parents and they sent me back alone to a prep school called Port Regis in Dorset in order to civilize me; I spoke fluent Jamaican patois but not proper English; prep school was an horiffic shock as the whole culture of the place was totally different from anything I knew and liked; have the first letter I ever wrote telling my mother how unhappy I was; initially I was mercilessly teased but I was quite tough and fought back; set remedial reading which bored me; rescued by a biology master who realized that I did know quite a lot about natural history; he gave me Wallace's book 'Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro'; written in 1853 when Wallace went to the Vaupes where I ended up doing my field research; coincidentally, Wallace gave the first ever account of Jurupari rituals on which I wrote my Ph.D.; the book inspired me to want to read, also from a very young age was determined to go to Amazonia; in botany remember learning about leaf adaptations, most of which one couldn't see except in the tropics; while in Jamaica my father had led an expedition to climb the mountains in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in Colombia so I also had Colombia in my head from an early age; at school I enjoyed reading about natural history; father was a chest physician, and although he said I could do anything I liked when I grew up, assumed I would go to medical school; felt pressure to become a doctor and did biology, physics and chemistry at school - by now I'd moved on to Bryanston School

17:38:22 Bryanston was better; still preferred being outdoors; met my wife Christine while there; she went to Bryanston's sister school, Cranborne Chase; the top scientists from there came to Bryanston as they didn't have proper laboratories; at the age of fourteen this beautiful blond girl appeared in my chemistry class; she had a slightly similar history, a bright girl whose parents also wanted her to do medicine; she was good at the maths and I was good at setting up the apparatus; she rebelled; failed to turn up for Cambridge interviews and went instead to study ceramics at the Central School of Art; there she had to do another course and took sociology; she then decided to become an academic and went to the L.S.E.; I had pressure from both parents and school to do medicine; I wrote to the Villa Boas brothers when I was about sixteen asking to work for them; told I was too young but started to read anthropology; first book I ordered was Ruth Benedict's 'Patterns of Culture' and shared it with my great friend, Alfred Gell, who shared my study; neither of us thought much of it, but the idea intrigued us; I read Levi-Strass's 'Triste Tropique' which I thought much more interesting, partly becanse is was about Brazil and Amazonia, but the structuralism was way over my head; had to go for interviews at medical schools and despite any real lack of interest was successful; then came to Cambridge for interview; as father had been at King's I put it last on my preferences with Caius at the top; failed both there and Peterhouse; at my King's interview I revealed that I didn't really want to do medicine; unexpectedly they asked what I was interested in and I said South American Indians and anthropology; asked if he would like an interview with Edmund Leach; by coincidence all Edmund's family had lived in Argentina - (the R.A.I.'s Esperanza Fund is named after the sugar mill that they owned in Northern Argentina); Edmund had an attachment to South America but not much knowledge about it; he also was the interpreter of Levi-Strauss and structuralism (this being 1962) in Britain; he also knew that the only British anthropologist to have worked in South America was Francis Huxley; Leach was excited by my awareness of South American Indians and Levi-Strauss; told him about my dilemma with medicine but accepted on the spot and encouraged to follow plan of going to South America

30:57:15 At school I had developed an interest in archaeology because when they were building the new music school they came across the remains of a Romano-British settlement so I instantly founded the Archaeology Club; we did do an excavation and to our delight found the skeleton of a Romano-British woman who was 6'2"; through archaeology I then developed an interest in Incas and Aztecs to Mayas; at school worked out why I didn't like archaeology and liked anthropology as in the context of South America the two run in parallel but more exciting to see the real people; before I came to King's I worked on the Victoria line which was being built to save for a trip to South America; with help from parents went to Venezuela by boat; found it extraordinarily expensive; on the boat had met an English school teacher and his wife who were going out to teach in Colombia and they had invited me to stay with them; got a bus and went to Bogata and stayed with them; started looking for Indians and heard about Reichel-Dolmatoff, the doyen of Colombian archaeology and anthropology; went to see him and he suggested I went to the Vaupes which straddles the equator on the Colombia-Brazil border; spent about nine months in Colombia; learnt Spanish; went to the Vaupes and spent about one month with people called the Cubeo whom Irving Goldman wrote about; heard of another river called the Pira-parana where Christine and I later did field research; people didn't go there as in the 1930's some rubber gatherers had been killed; also the river was dangerous with rapids so that missionaries had not gone there and the people had been left alone; decided then it was the place to do field research; travelled widely in Colombia and got to know it pretty well; came back to Cambridge knowing I wanted to study anthropology and where I wanted to do field research; tried to use South American material wherever I could in my studies; chose to do the South Asia special area partly because Leach and Tambiah taught it, but had found that there where analagous kinship systems with South America

39:22:09 Leach was my main teacher to whom I felt a debt of gratitude; I liked him although I found him absolutely terrifying at the beginning as he was very moody and unpredictable; if you agreed with him in an essay he would test you on why, if you disagreed he was offended; even when Christine and I were writing up we would go to see his secretary, June, and get what we called a weather forecast; if he was in a bad mood we would cancel our appointment with him; however, he was a wonderful supervisor and taught me how to supervise; essays would come back heavilly annotated showing a serious response; have tried to do the same with my own students; he was right at the cutting edge and encouraged us to read new field research such as the Stratherns on the 'moka'; Leach was partisan, and this was the time of the great debate between him and Fortes, and criticism of Jack Goody; Alfred Gell and I both felt that we had to be on one side or the other, and we were on the Leach-Tambiah side; didn't go to Jack's lectures though we did go to Reo Fortune's as they were so hilariously funny and completely off the wall; for instance, he would stand with his back to the class for an hour writing mathematical symbols on the board; Leach took over as Provost in my third year and Tambiah became Director of Studies so I also worked with him

45:27:18 At that time there were about eight or nine students in my year; nowadays its more likely to be thirty to forty but only one or two will continue in anthropology; then, as undergraduates, it was assumed we would go on, and most of us did; in my year there was Rod Stirrat, Vanessa Maher, Ibrahim Tahir, Roger Ballard, Alfred Gell - most of them went on to become anthropologists; don't remember much about Ray Abrahams at the time, or G.I. Jones, as they were Africanists and in the other camp, but do remember James Woodburn's lectures on the Hadza; only remember Fortes's first year lectures on the necktie and how good he was at running the third year seminar; when I finished as an undergraduate I announced my intention to stay on as a graduate student and to work in Amazonia; remember Meyer trying to persuade me to go to Ghana instead; did think of escaping from Cambridge as Peter Riviere had recently come back from research among the Trio and I thought I would like to go to Oxford to work with him; had an interview with Godfrey Lienhardt and Raymond Carr, the historian, who suggested Amazonian Indians were completely irrelevant and why didn't I do research in the Highlands of Latin America; they rejected my application and I came back to Cambridge to work with Edmund; had the benefit of Peter Riviere's weekly lecture here on South America as a special area so maintained contact with him, but had the benefit of Leach's interest and the challenge of working with him; feel that if Peter had been my supervisor it would have been too cosy and insular

54:26:10 Should explain the "we"; Christine had started doing sociology at the L.S.E. with a bias towards anthropology and very quickly transferred to anthropology; she was taught by Lucy Mair, James Woodburn and Raymond Firth, then by Anthony Forge; she was a year behind me although older than me; we had married in my second year as an undergraduate and we knew we wanted to do fieldwork together; there was some debate on where we should go as she was quite keen on New Guinea and I was absolutely certain I was going to Amazonia; after graduation I spent a year in King's supervising and reading as much as I could about Amazonia while Christine finished; she graduated in July and by the end of August we were in the field - so much for pre-fieldwork training that they have to do now; Edmund told me a little bit about what kind of notebooks to use, suggesting reporter's notebooks and indelible ink, and taking carbon copies; soon stopped the carbon copies but the indelible ink proved useful when I lost some notebooks overturning in a rapid; when they were recovered some four months later they were still legible; in my year another friend was Peter Silverwood-Cope whose father was a diplomat in Brazil; he wanted to go to South America so we teamed up; also doing the M. Phil. was Bernard Arcand who had wanted to work in the Nicobar Islands but couldn't get a permit so he came with us; we had all decided to go to Colombia; Christine and I were working with the Barasana, part of the Tucana group who were in contact with nomadic hunters, the Maku, whom Silverwood-Cope would study; Bernard chose to study the Cuiva on the basis of a pin in the map; Edmund solved our money problems by applying to the S.S.R.C. for money for research in the Colombian Amazon and employed all four of us as researchers; this is the "we" that I was referring to; Christine was one of Edmund's research students; when we came back and wrote our first chapters for him, Edmund covered mine with notes and hers was just marked "fine"; she went to see him and said she wanted to be treated just as I was with full critical notes which startled him somewhat.


SECOND PART

0:05:07 After initial difficulties, Christine and Edmund got on very well and he was most supportive when she decided to leave anthropology to become a doctor; Jack Goody was also supportive; later when Edmund was dying of cancer he and Christine were very close as he trusted her opinion on his state of health; similarly, with Alfred Gell, who also died of cancer; on the question of whether it is a good thing to have a wife who is also an anthropologist, did find it quite tough as we are both pretty competetive; in fieldwork there was the huge benefit of being able to work together to learn an unwritten language; Barasana also pretty rigidly divided by sex although Christine could function much better as an honorary male than I as an honorary female, we were quite split up during the day; however this meant that we had two views on everything; when I was initiated going through the 'jurupary' rite that I wrote my thesis on, women were not even supposed to know let alone see; Christine was in the back of the long house with the women while the men were in the front, with a screen between; the women actually reported all that happened to her and one old woman was consulted by her son on what to do next; Christine was able to show that there was no secret knowledge but the women were behaving in an appropriate manner; initially Christine found fieldwork difficult as I was with the men discussing shamen, myths, cults, and also going hunting while she spent her time digging in the manioc gardens in blazing sun; later she did find the experience of daily work gave revealing insights into practical and cosmological aspects of the Barasana; we found field research acutely stressful at times; Barasana were not exactly friendly due to negative experiences with white people; we depended on them for food and sometimes were very hungry; difficult in the writing up stage too as difficult to separate out criticisms of an academic kind from irritation; however, still happily married and still talk about anthropology all the time

11:00:19 On my findings, there were two axes on which I was working; in theoretical terms put Levi-Strauss's work into a specific tribal context, particularly with regard to myth; he had written little on ritual but I could show that myth and ritual work in a dialectical system; myth and structure; describes going through initiation, being painted black then red, on-off nature of ritual which Levi-Strauss had picked up almost intuitively; in terms of Amazonia, find that North-West Amazonia is very different from the classical pattern which is slightly atomistic, with strong divide between "us" and the outside world - kin and affine, friend and enemy, and relatively simple; in North-West Amazonia get development of lineages, hierarchy, elaborate architecture and mythology, probably related to much more complicated structure of chieftains historically; initiation rituals remnants of the much more complex priestly society which survived longer in the North-West; has similar features to societies in Polynesia and Melanesia such as secret flute cults which are odd in the context of the rest of Amazonia

20:47:21 There was no real first arrival at a fieldwork site; we work in a vast area with only about 30,000 Tukanoan Indians, some living in tows, others (in 1968) living in longhouses who had never met an outsider in their lives, none of whom spoke any language but their own; first arrival meant that you went from the city further and further out; we did an exploratory voyage down the length of the Pira-parana and then decided to go back to a particular longhouse owned by somebody called Bosco; we had thought it looked large and the people were friendly, with two powerful shamans; we arrived alone at night without a guide and simply stayed there; we couldn't communicate with them so learning Barasana language by gestures; children most helpful in language learning; took us about two or three months before we could converse enough to say who we were or what we were doing; had a retrospective view of our first arrival as we learnt what they had thought we were doing and who we were

25:42:00 Feel very much a psychic unity with the people; sometimes worrying that things become too familiar; Christine and I went native, partly for ideological reasons, but also for practical reasons; it was a difficult and dangerous place to get to so we couldn't take much with us; also knew that the previous experience of the Barasana with outsiders was with a rather brutal rubber gatherer and semi-enslavement; thus we never got anybody to carry anything for us; we lived in the longhouse, dressed as they did, ate what they ate; soon took the impressive architecture of the longhouse for granted and only much later looked at again; I get an enormous amount of pleasure that I can now walk into an Amerindian longhouse and be treated like an elder, and know how to behave; takes me back to my dreams in Jamaica of living with Amerindians

30:48:12 Don't feel I am escaping into another world; I do love being in Amazonia and I have brought together my interests in botany and zoology in recent work; do dislike the tendency to use Amerindians as a foil against which Westerners test themselves; Indians are either ignoble savages or pristine and pure; a lot of my writing has been against the binary view; don't accept that Amerindians are natural born ecologists or that clothes represent a corruption; I suppose my roots are counter-cultural and going to Amazonia in the sixties could be seen at that, but don't see it as a paradise

34:38:19 The experience of being between two cultures, initially Jamaica and Britain, was one of the reasons I became an anthropologist; my experience of the tropics was of animals and plants, I still keep snakes; this was one of the things I loved about Amazonia and enabled me to communicate quite effectively with the Indians; not unsurpising that they should have such a wide knowledge of the world around them; learnt from them and have done quite a bit of work on herpatology and will write it up now I am retired; combination of my own interest in snakes, lizard, frogs and also the people whom I work with who are similarly very interested, and whose mythology and symbolic ideas are full of flora and fauna. 

38:33:01 Joined Cambridge Anthropology Society early at a freshers' fair; met Caroline Humphreys, Jonny Parry, and Chris Fuller, who were just above me; Edmund used to tell us who to invite to talk to the society; we got Desmond Morris as he was about to write 'The Naked Ape', Mary Douglas - Edmund used to refer to the Leach-Douglas theory of taboo, but he found her a bit difficult; remember occasion where Edmund signalled displeasure with a speaker by rattling keys, then going to sleep and snoring loudly; speaker furious, most embarrasing; I became an assistant lecturer in 1971 in the year we returned from Amazonia; although I never had the intention of becoming an academic but Fortes suggested I applied for a job in Latin American Studies; by then had one child and another about to be born, Bernard Archand wanted to go back to Canada and Peter Silverwood-Cope wanted to go to Brazil; I was writing my thesis while Christine was going to delay hers so I was the likely candidate for the job and got it; became a fellow of King's in 1974 where I had been Director of Studies; at the time we lived a hippy-type existence out at the Gog Magog hills and had nothing to do with the university; I was summoned by the college Council to discuss supervisions and to my surprise was offered a fellowship; later got heavilly involved with King's and became Assistant Senior Tutor for three years among other things; King's has been privileged in anthropology so good to be here as an anthropologist; always stimulating, and the Friday Seminar used to be held here; also get extremely good undergraduates

49:48:08 Enjoyed administration and working with people, trying to achieve things together; I enjoyed being Head of Department where I saw my role as to be a facilitator; Jack Goody as Head of Department; had very good relations with Marilyn Strathern, a person who cares about people; volunteered to take over as Head of Department from her so that the headship would no longer be tied to the William Wyse Chair; thinking of the faculty, the alliance of archaeology, biological anthropology and social anthropology, feel that administratively its a good thing as the others can act as a friedly critic of what we do and vice versa; do think that the Part I is problematic as it should be connected at an intel1ectual level, but does not, as taught, appear to emphasize the overlaps between them; a missed opportunity as I can see from Amazonia where archaeologists and anthropologists work very closely together; Am enjoying retirement which has allowed me to write more than ever before, also to develop other interests in Tibet and Bhutan to pursue