Roy Wagner interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 9th June 2008

0:09:07 Born in Cleveland, Ohio, 1938; family originated in Hamelin, Lower Saxony who moved to lands depopulated by the Moguls, so metal-workers living in Eastern Carpathia under Hungarian rule until my great-great-grandfather came to the United States in 1890; he had owned a water-powered iron forge; my father was the Chief of Police of Cleveland, and a very tough guy; he was also an intellectual, which was very unusual; he looked just like Dick Tracy, the American comic book hero; for most of his career he was chief of the detective bureau which is what an intellectual cop does; not sure my father cared much about anthropology but my mother liked it and bought me Kroeber textbooks in my teens; she was a housewife; she was very withdrawn and quiet; I often think of her being like Kali; she died at fifty-two; have a sister who is an accomplished Egyptologist, and writes novels on the subject under the name Nancy Elliot

4:31:18 Went to Benjamin Franklin elementary school in Cleveland; we were taught to garden which was one of the best things of my education which I put to use when an adult; aged ten, I remember waiting in a line of children outside the garden when an idea came into my mind that of all the possible things that could happen in the next moment only one of them would; not used to thinking in that way and puzzled me for a long time; my school record there was mediocre and I didn't do anything much until I got to high school; there I discovered sonnets and tried to write them; wanted to be a physicist and took SAT tests to qualify for college; had always got terrible grades in maths but took the verbal and mathematic achievement tests; on a whim I had applied to CALTECH because they ran the Mount Palomar Observatory and I wanted to be an astronomer; a faculty member from CALTECH came to my high school to interview me; I was dumbfounded as it turned out I had done very well in the maths test; I had a long interview with him talking about sonnets until he said wasn't I interested in astronomy; revealed he was from an English department; I did not get in but I was proud to have almost done so; later I did find writing sonnets was fun; also enjoy reading poetry, and early on enjoyed Dylan Thomas and Rilke; I used to translate Rilke for Vic Turner who really liked him; I was told by the Harvard Astronomy Department to take German which helped me with Rilke; also did a wonderful course in Chaucer taken by Bartlett Whiting, an expert on humour in Chaucer

11:12:12 At high school had Hiram T. Folkman, an incredible Shakespeare teacher, and a maths and science teacher called Oliver Hoffman; these two were more or less guiding spirits to me; Folkman would make you get up and interpret things in Shakespeare; think that this exercise prepared me for the art of explanation in anthropology; a lot of the things we would like to conquer with abstractions in anthropology are actually too concrete to stand the abstractions of theory; I prefer to lecture extempore and was prepared for this by Folkman; on physics: at the time the U.S. was going through a lot of difficulty with Oppenheimer and the removal of his security clearance; I was very much an Oppenheimer fan and later became interested in the case; he had a great facility with words and I was told that he thought of going into literature as an alternative career; around 1990 I was contacted by a man who had taken up deep sea diving and wanted information on New Guinea; he told me his name, Lewis Strauss, and described himself as just another faceless Washingtonian; this was the head of the Atomic Energy committee responsible for removing Oppenheimer's security clearance, so the ultimate enemy of my youth; found out that he hated Oppenheimer and had managed to engineer this coup against him; it resulted in Strauss never holding another Government office either

16:58:10 At Harvard my room mate was a very good orchestral conductor and I learnt much about music there; at high school I think I was supposed to be discovering women, and I was slow at it; it was a co-educational school; Cleveland was very working-class, famous for its steel mills; this was the fifties when rock and roll music, which I did not care for, started; it was the height of the cold war; the degree to which we Americans were being shut up, repressed, was probably being counterparted by the Soviet Union at that time, although we always thought of ourselves as being free; I watched the McCarthy hearings regularly on TV; I felt it was outrageous and didn't like it and felt he was getting away with something; finally Eisenhower shut him up; Einstein responded when they were punishing Oppenheimer; I suppose I was a liberal at that time; now I am an anarchist as I don't think that the political fora that we have engage the major issues of our time; I don't vote; I did vote for John F. Kennedy but not afterwards

21:41:12 I was gloomy at the time I was accepted by Harvard as I would have preferred to go to CALTECH; I went there to be an astronomer; by some stroke of luck the astronomy department assigned Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin to be my tutor; for about a year I was working towards being an astronomy major; she loved poetry and music so that when I had a tutorial session we talked about Mozart or  poetry; much later in my life when I got divorced I engaged a famously beautiful and vicious divorce lawyer; we never talked about law, but about cats and dogs; there must be many situations like this where people just talk about what they like, and that has nothing to do with why they are there; I write about music; harmonization techniques of J.S. Bach closes upon holography and defractal mathematics which is a major interest of mine; success with identifying what I call holographic world views in New Guinea; my colleague, Fred Damon, does this sort of thing; I took up the cudgels for J.C. Bach who was the most important composer of his day, and who we have lately learnt was the teacher of Mozart; think the secret of his music is the syncopation which gives a sense of acceleration; called the New Music, as in London and Mannheim in c1750 music changed and became the classical music of Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven; I am interested in that as a combination of mathematics and aesthetics; most of what passes as scientific knowledge is visual and very strictly dependent, like the periodic table; interest in sound and mathematical resonance, has played a big role in my theoretical development; like Handel but prefer J.C. Bach; British role in revival of interest in J.C. Bach; importance of London where J.C. Bach worked; concerts with his friend Gainsborough; Mannheim school

31:53:06 I quit astronomy after one year and experimented with English for one semester, then history; I did my degree in medieval history; in my senior (fourth) year I met Eugene Anderson on a poetry composition course; he was an anthropology major and more or less steered me in that direction; he suggested that the way historians and anthropologists thought was very different; as I was not very impressed with the historians who seem to think chronologically and miss the paradigmatic, cross-cutting factors; anthropologists don't seem to have that problem; anthropology seems to give the other set of references which history doesn't provide; I take anthropological thinking seriously but the subject suffers from fragmentation; people wonder where anthropology is going, and we are no help; abolition of subject disciplines, as in China, may be a good thing; occurs to me that the only kind of generalist who could make sense of this situation would be an anthropologist; AAA conventions unbelievably chaotic, with c5,000 persons talking with each other; how would you ever get unity out of that? Love it if some of these young geniuses, like Tony Crook in England, could think of a way of bringing order into this chaos of ideas; Tony did something wonderful for our work in Papua New Guinea; unbeknownst to many people there is a multi-ethnic religion in the centre of New Guinea, an institutionalized religion that has persisted for about four hundred years in the Ok Tedi region; has its own buildings which are rebuilt generation after generation; I had a chance to interview some of the elders a few years ago; ideology of this religion described; somewhere between Buddhism and quantum theory, an intellectual discipline that is indigenous to New Guinea and existed without a centralized state; Crook described it as the graveyard of anthropological careers; seems to be a competition between anthropologists and the indigenous folk, and the latter win; Frederik Barth published the first, and for a long time, only book on the Montagnard; mentioned "the amazing thing is the absence of shared assumptions between people in intimate interaction"; that lost him his job, his wife divorced him; people take things very seriously in Norway; Crook found a solution to the Montagnard thing by suggesting that these people had developed the art of changing the subject in mid-sentence; they have developed a rhetoric that this society is full of secrets and that no one will ever find out what those secrets are; the secrets do not exist but this is their way of talking; he had solved what was the biggest problem in New Guinea studies, and also the biggest problem in anthropology; so there is hope that some day anthropology will achieve some unifying synthesis; culture and kinship and British and American biases

46:49:00 Reminiscences about Marilyn and Andrew Strathern and their work in the New Guinea Highlands; Victor Turner and the Virginia Africanists; Edmund Leach's work on Highland Burma and the thoughts of a Chinese anthropologist on 'gumsa' and 'gumlao'; Evans-Pritchard and 'The Nuer'; Marshall Sahlins, David Schneider and humour in anthropology; Schneider was my Ph.D. supervisor at Chicago; Redfield and after at Chicago; Milton Singer and Fred Eggan; Eggan brought Schneider, Geertz and Fallers from Berkeley, as Parsonian anthropologists; difficulty of digesting Talcott Parsons

Second Part

0:09:07 Schneider, Geertz and Fallers developed their own idiom called cultural analysis, which was a complete change of emphasis following the ideas of Ruth Benedict; Geertz left for Princeton in the early 1970's, but prior during the 1960's the Chicago department turned itself around; Julian Pitt-Rivers taught me and I learnt much from him that was practical and immediate, valuable for my first experience of field work in New Guinea; my book, 'The Invention of Culture' was written because I had become increasingly annoyed with the type of anthropology that was being done at North Western when I was there, and didn't come up to what they were doing at Chicago; theme of the book described; invention opposed to construction of culture; book first published by Prentice Hall where the first chapters were a little turgid; later republished by Chicago where I was allowed to change the worst two pages; I teach Wittgenstein and Borges, also Ursula le Guin, and why

20:09:09 Symbols, and explanation of the paradox; Gregory Bateson and his idea of the feedback loop described

31:45:19 Own fieldwork site was chosen for me; University of Washington had an open competition among graduate students for the New Guinea native religions project; I had a plan to study Australian Aborigines if I did not go to New Guinea; had a dream that I was getting into an airliner and was going to Australia to do fieldwork but in mid-flight the plane turned into a single-engined Cessna which landed on a grass airstrip which I realized was New Guinea; woke to find a telegram announcing that I was to go to New Guinea; 4-5 months later I was in that Cessna, landing on that strip; was totally bewildered and confused; had never been to another country before; had a bad start, got sick trying to live on a native diet; lived in the village for a year and a few months and that was the nicest time in my whole life; had wonderful rapport with the Daribi; they had only been contacted in the previous two or three years; they wouldn't tell you anything, but it was a remarkable experience; my mother had died just before I left and it was like a rebirth; after my initial fieldwork and writing my dissertation at Chicago, I got a job at Southern Illinois for a few years; I married there and my wife then came with me for another ten or eleven months; that was a much better time as I knew what to ask them; the Daribi have a ritual, the Habu, that I had just missed attending the first time which turned out to be extremely important; I was able to attend it, photograph it and participate in it; that experience was the subject of my second book which was much better than my dissertation; it is one of the few anthropological monographs that has been used as the basis for science fiction; I returned in 2000; on my second trip I had heard that the colonial government which was about to leave New Guinea had secretly been buying up a lot of land to resettle 5,000 Chimbus there; Chimbus are aggressive people and had manipulated the Daribi in the past; I took political action and wrote about ethnocide in and Australian political journal; that resulted in very little except for the Governor General having press conferences against me in Port Moresby so it was not advisable to go back; a correspondent, Ian Hicks, from the Sydney Morning Herald picked it up with the result that the Labour Government informed the Governor General that there would be no resettlement; since then the Daribi have increased their population so there are now 20,000 of them; when I eventually went back in 2000 it was wonderful, and I did discover things I would never have guessed existed there

41:04:24 My father's family were Marxists; father rational, atheistic, hard-working; I identified with this and didn't thinks seriously about religion until much later in my life; the work of Castaneda has been rightly criticized but I have evidence that he really did do fieldwork with Mexican people but not the Yaqui; David McKnight's work on bats and own findings on the Daribi attitude to bats; analogy of God as a bat at a cocktail party; recollective and anticipatory  selves; the totality of the selves according to Castaneda's Don Juan, and the nature of death