Jonathan Parry interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 5th December 2008

0:09:07 Born in London in 1943; father was a civil servant, trained in classics at Cambridge, wrote novels; died when I was young; mother's father was a tailor in Swansea, a fact concealed from me; [Since your interview, however, I had a
long conversation with my sister (who admittedly knows much more about
family history than I do) and she glosses it as 'cloth merchant'. Her story
is that he was in partnership with another man, and when World War 1 broke
out they drew lots as to which should volunteer. My grandfather came back
from the War suffering from the effects of mustard gas poisoning and to find
the business had gone bust. He never worked again. Anyway the essential
point about my mother's family being a good deal less posh than my father's
is valid. The wedding certificate of my maternal grandparents describes my
MFF as 'retired manure dealer' and my MMF as a railway clerk (which is all
news to me!). By contrast, the wedding certificate of my FF describes his
father as having the occupation of 'gentleman'! None of that is of any
interest to anybody but me, but for historical accuracy I just wanted to
declare that 'tailor' is disputed, and this is symptomatic of the
interesting sociological fact that my mother's (relatively) humble origins
were always kept a secret from us children]; the marriage broke down when I was six; brought up by my mother; father interested in books but had very little contact with him beyond six as the marriage break-up was acrimonious; have an elder sister for whom it was much more traumatic; mother had been a sickly child and left school young; not well-educated in the formal sense but very pretty when young; the marriage was disapproved of by my father's family and she was not treated well by them; she was socially insecure; later on she went to live in Italy on a small income; she became fluent in Italian and went to art classes; she was a strong-willed woman; as a mother she was supportive, warm and affectionate; her relationship with my sister was not easy; my mother's parents were dead by the time I was born; my father's father must have died about the time of my birth; I did know my grandmother as a child; she was a dragon

7:03:06 My first proper school was a boy's prep school; I was still only six or just seven; I was manic about learning to play cricket; on the whole had a reasonably happy school life; academically not very distinguished and I was more interested in sport; only at sixteen did I start reading people like Bertram Russell and thought I would like to be an intellectual; first school, in Kent, burnt down after I had been there a couple of years; it temporarily closed but then moved to Wiltshire; I was always interested in history; in my later school had very good history teaching; as a small boy I was keen on stamp collecting and may have had something to do with later interest in anthropology; after preparatory school I went to Sherborne in Dorset; have rather jaundiced memories as the aspiration was to become an army officer in Sandhurst, or the Stock Exchange; few went to university; at that time it meant going to Oxford or Cambridge, the fall-back being Trinity College, Dublin; they didn't send students to London or Reading; my memory of it was of a snobbish school; Derek Jarrett and Graham Stephenson both taught history and they were the most charismatic teachers that I had; at A level I did a special paper on the unification of Italy which appealed to my imagination; did no science after O level and was never good at it; had an undistinguished academic career but was just good enough to scrape into Cambridge; did become interested in politics at school; even at school became interested in CND though it was partly rebelliousness against the conservative institution at that stage

14:24:15 I was brought up as an Anglican; at about eight or nine became a religious enthusiast for a little while; I was confirmed, but from the age of about sixteen have been an agnostic; in later years I became a somewhat dogmatic atheist; I think my personal attitudes to religion were hardened by doing the Banaras study; my inclinations were literary, and I was interested in writing; I dabbled briefly in writing poetry; my advise to a young anthropologist is not to read anthropology but to learn how to write, not something many anthropologists so well, the exceptions being Evans-Pritchard, Godfrey Lienhardt, André Béteille; Edmund Leach wrote forcefully, if somewhat angular in style; I would still recommend Bertram Russell's essays, which got me into anthropology; think he wrote with admirable clarity; George Orwell would also be an excellent model; since the advent of computers, I write by hand, put it into the computer, print it out, rewrite next draft by hand, and do so until it is in a shape that is acceptable; write even a short review by hand as I find it easier to work on the balance of sentences with paper in front of me

20:17:13 I came to King's, Cambridge; I had an entrance exam and was interviewed by Edmund Leach as I had expressed a slight interest in doing anthropology; I came to do archaeology and anthropology and it was a revelation to be taught by Edmund; what I remember is the incredibly meticulous comments on essays, and how he would pick books off his shelves for you to read; he was a brilliant undergraduate teacher, very charismatic; I realize the commitment of time and effort he put into his teaching; he was also incredibly helpful when I was writing up my PhD although in the first year he would leave us to sink or swim; when I was just going off to do fieldwork, senior students like Maurice Bloch and the Stratherns, Jim Farris and Adam Kuper, had just come back; they organised a seminar and Carrie Humphrey and I were just beginners; I gave a paper at one of these, a critique of Edmund's 'Animal Categories and Verbal Abuse'; I showed it to him and he was infuriated; when I came back from the field, the first thing that I wrote was a critique of Edmund's introduction to 'Aspects of Caste'; I showed it to him and got wonderful comments back; there were four or five of us undergraduates who went on; Carrie was one, another was Jane Bramley, later Bunnag, who did fieldwork in Thailand and married a Thai, Enid Schildkrout who did fieldwork in Ghana, and Keith Hart; Keith had done classics so was technically a year above us; I didn't know him well until later; apart from Edmund, among the teachers was Tambiah, who came when we were undergraduates; he was young and joined the third year undergraduates socially; he was a good lecturer; don't think I got to know Meyer Fortes or Jack Goody until later; there was evident antagonism between Leach and Fortes, and we were encouraged to support one or other of them; the good lecturers when I was an undergraduate were Edmund and Tambiah; I also found Ray Abrahams lectures clear, but I didn't go to many lectures while here; Edmund would give me books which I would read

31:19:00 I chose archaeology and anthropology partly because of a Bertrand Russell essay, 'Marriage and Morals'; it starts with Malinowski and the Trobriands and the nature of the family; in my late teens had a lot of freedom to travel in the summer; had been to Turkey and Morocco on my own; I came across Westermarck; I had heard of anthropology and it seemed exotic, and the idea appealed to me; on a pragmatic level felt I had a better chance of getting into King's to do anthropology than history; came up in 1962; Annan was Provost; it had a liberal reputation compared to other colleges; it was relatively relaxed and I made some good friends; anthropology and girlfriends took me over, above all anthropology; it was the first time I had seriously engaged in intellectual activity and got obsessed with it; one of the things that has always appealed to me about anthropology is that it is a discipline of relativising and questioning the assumptions of other social science disciplines; there is something about the democracy of anthropology and the interest in ordinary lives or living people

36:53:22 I did disastrously in my first year exams because I ignored archaeology and physical anthropology; in the second and third years I got firsts; won a State studentship to go on to do a PhD; when I was preparing for my finals I had to fill in forms to continue and Edmund suggested I apply to work in India; it quite appealed to me; I knew I did not want to work in Africa; intuitively I wanted to work in a society with a rich recorded history and an ancient culture; South East Asia and Japan have also attracted me; I originally said I wanted to work on polyandry in an area of the U.P. hills, and indeed I thought I would do it until I went to India; part of my decision was the desire to be supervised by Edmund; during the pre-fieldwork period we were very much left to our own devices; I read a lot about India; remember a seminar on councillors that Audrey Richards ran with Adam Kuper that I used to participate in; as an undergraduate had been to seminars that she ran; never knew her well but she was warm and friendly; the pre-fieldwork period was October until June, then I went to India by boat from Marseilles

42:28:13 Remember landing at Bombay and hit by the crowds and heat; took a train to Poona where I met up with a fellow Cambridge graduate student, Tony Carter; he introduced me to village India; he took me off for about a week to stay in the village where he was doing fieldwork; it was an amazing confidence boost because I learnt the practicalities of how one might live in the field; this was very important as I realized I could cope; I then went in the summer heat without any train reservations in a third class carriage to Delhi; stayed in a small hotel and reported to M.N. Srinivas at the Department of Sociology at the Delhi School of Economics; during the preparatory year, André Béteille, who was then a Simon Fellow in Manchester, had come down to see Edmund and I was detailed to show him around; Edmund then persuaded André to become my supervisor while I was doing fieldwork; that led to a very important academic and personal relationship; I never got to know Srinivas particularly well; he was gracious, helpful, good-humoured, but a little distant; André is a man of almost frightening honesty and integrity, extraordinarily bright, quite reserved, loyal to his friends, and perhaps the most distinguished Indian social scientist of his generation; I have always thought of him as a product of Calcutta and Bengal rather than someone with dual ancestry; it is interesting that he has written about social inequality from so many different dimensions but that one aspect he has written much less on is race

49:33:02 Srinivas asked me why I was going to work in a very atypical polyandrous pocket of the U.P. hills; Majumdar had written a book on the area; he lived in Lucknow and had used the area as a place to send his students to do bits of ethnographic research; Srinivas suggested I look elsewhere and I selected Kangra; it was a beautiful lush valley with snow-capped mountains up one side of it; I found it easy to meet a few people who were encouraging and suggested a few villages; having abandoned work in a polyandrous area, another interest I had at that stage was local level politics; I had been influenced and impressed by Freddy Bailey's work and Tony Carter was also interested in factional politics; was told of Kangra villages where political rivalries looked interesting though I never actually wrote about that at all; I think it was the most difficult fieldwork that I have done; I have worked since in two other areas and have got to enjoy it more as I got older; the first three months were somehow a terrific relief; I was living with a nice family and the people were friendly; the next period I remember as traumatic; there was a general election going on and because I was interested in politics I was making quite a lot of enquiries; people suddenly became rather suspicious and I was reaching a linguistic plateau and appeared to be making little progress; after six months I got into a routine and was much clearer about what I was doing; I was in India for two and a half years and in the field for twenty-six months; this was longer than nowadays; we were sent off in a much more open-ended way; I think it is still viable if people have enough time but in the present funding climate it is not possible; I was lucky in that I ended up writing about caste and kinship though I hardly knew of Louis Dumont's work when I went to the field; André had been reading Dumont and would ask me questions, so somehow I was collecting data that was relevant to Dumontian questions without properly having read him; I did meet him a few times; I esteem him highly although he has become increasingly unfashionable; I think any Indianist of my generation has had their career and intellectual agenda set by Dumont; I think he has been unfairly criticised and was right where it is conventional now to say that he was wrong; the theory about the substantialization of caste which is still trotted out I feel is deeply problematic; he was a powerful figure who represented to people of my generation the very exciting possibility of being able to bring together the very diverse studies that have been done in India and make sense of them according to a small set of unifying principles; exciting to relate what Bailey was saying about Orissa with something that was going on in Tamil Nadu

Second Part

0:09:07 First fieldwork was an attempt to demonstrate the pervasiveness of the principle of hierarchy and its penetration within castes, following Dumont; how the language of hierarchy is used to describe other forms of social relationships; ideas of equality rooted in notions of brotherhood; most important ethnographic finding was about unequal marriage and internal contradictions within the system; work influenced by Leach and Levi-Strauss; I am conscious of the parallels with my own parents unequal marriage; I did a lot of work on local level politics, too, but André discouraged me from pursuing it; I think he was right in saying that I was too ill-informed to use such data; no conflict between supervisors as I had only one letter from Edmund during fieldwork; I had written a piece on politics for an Indian journal 'Seminar' and had sent him a copy when published; it was the time that Edmund was becoming Provost of King's so was busy

6:05:08 I found it quite difficult to come back to Cambridge; I had valued my experiences as an undergraduate but didn't like it afterwards; partly because all my friends had moved on; Carrie was still doing fieldwork, Keith's had been much shorter; I didn't know people very well and in fact I went to live in London; I came back at the end of 1968 and suddenly the world of youth culture and political landscape had changed and all felt quite alien; as I recall there were not writing-up seminars; there were regular Friday seminars and I gave at least two papers there; I remember them better before I went to the field as ritual jousts; I was attached to the Delhi School of Economics and I found the sociology seminars there were better and more engaged and articulate; after that I looked at the Cambridge seminars with a more critical eye; while I was writing-up Tambiah was running the South Asia class and he used to have Roger Ballard and I to help him; it took about two and a half years to write the thesis and I found it agony, but also satisfying; I was examined by Meyer Fortes and David Pocock and they were complimentary; I remember the viva as a slightly trying experience as Meyer sometimes used to speak in the way he wrote - long sentences, many parentheses

12:56:05 At that point I already had a job at Edinburgh but had promised to finish the thesis before starting; I handed in the thesis the day before I started teaching in 1971; stayed there for three years; it was pleasant; I liked the city and my boss, Littlejohn; the department was not in a very good shape and I was quite glad to get out of it; I then moved to the LSE in 1974; it was headed by Julian Pitt-Rivers and Ioan Lewis, also there was Jean La Fontaine, James Woodburn, Stephen Morris, Peter Loizos, Joanna Overing joined the same year as me; there were intellectual tensions, but on the whole people talked to each other; thought it was a very engaged intellectual atmosphere; there were people who worked together more than others, so there was a degree of apparent exclusiveness but I didn't actually experience it; when I first went Maurice Bloch was still quite junior but enjoyed a reputation as an iconoclast; what I enjoy most are graduate supervisions; at the LSE graduate students have two supervisors and Chris Fuller and I tend to take those working on South Asia; we form a harmonious team which has worked quite well in recent years; I have taught between thirty-five and forty PhD students; I have done all the routine administration, including graduate admissions; did four years as the convenor which I did not like, not because of my colleagues who were supportive, but hated dealing with LSE bureaucracy; in my first three years as convenor we had several inspections and reports which I found a strain; it was in the early 1990's when departments were becoming cost centres and you ran your own budgets

21:26:03 Margaret, my wife, and I were living together when I was writing-up my PhD thesis; we married shortly after taking the Edinburgh job; she is a documentary film maker; her films are on politically engaged topics; my latest fieldwork has been on industrial central India; to begin with I did it on my own because of the stage the children were at; Margaret set up an access training programme for teaching documentary film to twelve local kids in India, and has developed an interest in that place; I started the Banaras fieldwork in 1976 after going back very briefly to Kangra in 1974; felt I had written all I wanted to say on Kangra so I went to look for another possible site in 1974; I did fifteen months fieldwork in Banaras to start with, then kept going back until the middle of the 1980's; it was a study of death, and the various caste groups of mortuary specialists; it was also a study of representations of death and mortuary rituals; I found the Banaras fieldwork very interesting and challenging; found a number of the ideas underlying what people were saying deeply disturbing and unpleasant; work on gifts and debts and the remuneration of priests, resulted in a reinterpretation of Mauss's work

31:32:21 Work with Maurice Bloch on morality of money; had done an earlier book 'Death and the Regeneration of Life' which gave a profile to LSE anthropology; followed this with a similar collection 'Money and the morality of exchange' which is still used by students; I have found it quite easy to work with Maurice although he could be very critical; memories of Alfie Gell

36:29:10 I needed a shift of scene from Banaras; André had for a long time encouraged me to look at modern India more seriously so I was sympathetic to the idea of doing something on industry; the work in Bhilai was on steel workers in a Soviet built steel plant which had been constructed on a green field site; Alfred had a PhD student, Chris Pinney, and I was involved with supervising him at some stage when Alfred was ill; Pinney had been studying a company town in Madhya Pradesh; he influenced me, but also Michael Taussig's book 'The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America'; thought Taussig's work interesting but his ethnography was not very rich; opened up a field that I thought I would like to get into; I went in 1992 to look around; Alfie Gell suggested I might look at Bhilai; I went there for a day and thought I could really imagine making something of it, so that is why I went there; my question was really non-academic but I wondered what a peasant who had lived in the villages around it would have experienced having lived through an industrial revolution; I started working with workers in the steel plant who are the aristocracy of labour; then realised that as a public sector factory it would be different from one in the private sector, so felt I needed to do some work in a private factory; then felt I should look at the informal sector at the bottom; so it has gone on expanding; feel now of an age where I have got to draw it to a close; I have written quite a number of articles about it but there are still things I want to write in monograph form; I would love to do more fieldwork in a different kind of setting but I have been going there since 1993 and have incredible amounts of data to write up

43:20:33 A man called Ajay became my research assistant in Bhilai; he comes from Kerala and his family had moved to Bhilai late 1950's early 1960's; when I met him he had been an agent for a very small company in Calcutta selling gear boxes to the steel plant; he hated the job so became my assistant; later he worked with Margaret as one of the students on her documentary film project; he got involved in the civil rights movement, documented some police atrocities and he was picked up and put in gaol for 93 days, eventually letting him out without charging him; very important to my ethnography has been the experience of working with research assistants of whom Ajay was one; he is still a very good friend as is the person who in my second year in Kangra was my research assistant there; I have worked with these people who have become personal friends and with real intellectual interests, but not at all educated in formal terms; they have been so important to the ethnography I have been able to get; I am ambivalent about how involved one should become if witnessing injustices; I somewhat mistrust anthropology that goes over too much into social activism; there is an incompatibility between the anthropologist/sociologist's task and the partisanship of political activism; however, when your good friends, people in whose houses you have lived, on whom the success of your project depended, then get picked on and imprisoned, and all their friends desert them, what else can you do?

48:40:00 On the future of India, I feel deeply concerned about the proportion of the Indian population that are left out of the economic upsurge, and whose basic rights are effectively denied - education, health etc. - and for whom the democratic system and legal apparatus does not work at all; I feel gloomy; the study that I have been doing is quite relevant to this; you have a working class in a place like Bhilai, part of which is a real aristocracy of labour, enjoy privileged conditions, are upwardly mobile, with decent education and medical facilities, but have no interest in the informal sector or in becoming politically active on behalf of those below them