Second Part

0:05:07 By the time I returned to Cambridge, Edmund had become my supervisor; he was wonderful; he used to say that I should not expect him to chase after me but he was there if I needed him; that was very good because it meant that the onus was on you, and you only got it touch with him when you had something to show him; he was very inspirational; I hero-worshipped him as a student; he was very engaging and had lots of ideas, and was intellectually demanding; he was quite tough-minded and you knew he would say what he thought; I did not find that he treated me differently because I was a woman; some of his students he thought of as his heirs, but I felt that he supported me and he seemed to respect the work that I had done; my thesis was on shamanism and was quite largely based on the historical work that I had done in Moscow before I went to the field, and on a few interviews on the theme that I managed to do there; it was quite historical, and a semiotic and structuralist approach; I was very excited at that time, not just by Levi-Strauss, but particularly by Ronald Barthes and his ideas on semiology; I did a study of shamanic drawings of the spirits using a semiological approach; the drawings were structurally organised and their meanings in plentiful stories, so it seemed to work quiet well; but I felt that there could be problems with the thesis theoretically which is why I never published it; one of the issues was pointed out to me at my PhD oral by Ray Abrahams, one of my examiners; he asked who made the drawings for whom, and I suddenly realized that that was the right question; that instead of taking them as a kind of system, like Levi-Strauss's myths, these had actually been made by individual people and kept in particular people's houses, and they had meanings for specific life events; I hadn't been able to treat that dimension of them and I knew that I ideally should have done; when I began to think about the theoretical difficulties of that problem I put off re-writing the thesis as a book; meanwhile I got involved in writing a book about the collective farms because that was what my fieldwork in Russia had actually been about, and I felt I had to write about it; before publishing the book I went back to Buryatia a second time; in the intervening period, I went to Mongolia (which is just over the border) and did some work there, and then went back to Buryatia; thus the book was based on more than the two months fieldwork, but it was quite reliant on things like local newspapers, publications by Buryat writers, government documents, all sorts of other materials that at the time were not conventionally used in anthropology; I do remember Meyer Fortes saying when he saw some of this stuff that what I was doing was not anthropology at all, because he was used to something unadulterated, village fieldwork; this wasn't only that; I used local statistics and criticised them, looked at different offficial regulations, all sorts of things; my question was what is this strange way of living, of having a huge area the size of Yorkshire as one farm, with people scattered in several villages all working together collectively; how does it work, do people believe in it, what do they think they are doing, does the Soviet imprint work with people whose culture is quite different - Buddhist, Mongolian-speaking, very different from the Russians; at that time in the late sixties and early seventies it was rather an effective system; this was the period of the thaw under Khrushchev, so it was after all the Stalinist repressions and incredibly difficult times, and they made it work more or less; one of the reasons why it worked for Buryats was because they had never had private property, so they weren't used to little farms, but did nomadize on a large scale and in some ways collectively; collectivism fitted their way of life and they were heaving subsidized in various ways by the State; by the late 1960s-70s they had a reasonable standard of living for Russia, no shortage of work, and most were trained in what they did; every tractor driver had a grade and training appropriate to that, so did the shepherds and milkmaids; they had several schools, culture clubs and cinemas, a music school, canteens, a little world of its own that sort of worked; I went to two farms; in the early 1990s one of them was decollectivised; what happened was that the senior people running it took over bits of it, divided it up and turn it into a series of smaller farms, although still huge by British standards; the other one didn't break up and as far as I know it is still going; they were both named after Karl Marx; I went to see the one that didn't break up not long ago; since the fall of the Soviet Union they have set up a new statue of Karl Marx which sits at their boundary, and everybody who goes into the collective farm stops and make a little offering to him, a few drops of vodka, before they enter

9:27:05 I enjoy writing but it is incredibly hard work; you have to concentrate so much that even physically it seems hard; at the end of writing for some hours you feel quite tired, at least I do, and also it is tough because you have to rewrite it all so often; I enjoy it a lot more than other academic tasks like sitting on committees or lecturing; I take lots of notes and for big books I tend to index things; if I am working on a subject and have read all kinds of different materials on that subject I could locate them because in the index it would indicate where to look; for articles I don't do that; I tend to write in the mornings when I have more energy; I usually rewrite a number of times; I write on the computer and have never written long hand; I can't remember any Eureka moments, though I have had lots of ideas that build up in some way; I don't ever write the same thing twice and like to do fresh things; I guess that my work seems all over the place to a lot of people; I have worked on politics, linguistic anthropology, art, cities, all kinds of things; if I were to choose what I consider my more important works, one would be the Karl Marx Collective because it was my first book, and because I think it did try to get to grips with a very strange way of living; another, 'Shamans and Elders' tries to understand shamanism from a Mongolian point of view; the third is the book I am working on now, and is about a Buddhist monastery in Inner Mongolia, in China, where I have been doing fieldwork for the last twelve years or so, accompanied by colleagues, and the book is being co-authored with a Mongolian, Hurelbaatar; I like working with colleagues, and on the whole find it fun sharing ideas; there are some kinds of books which seem to need more than one person; the book I did with David Sneath was a bit like that as he had certain kinds of knowledge and abilities that were superior to mine, and I had other strengths; the same thing is true of the book I am writing now with Hurelbaatar; he would not want to write on anthropological theory, but to understand the underlying meaning of what people are saying, or the kind of ethics that lie behind a particular evaluation people give to things, such a book would be undoable without him; when writing the book with James Laidlaw on ritual we would exchange chapters and each tackle a particular bit; with this book I am writing it, but the conversation with Hurelbaatar is about what goes into it; working with others in this way is reflected in the title of my Chair - collaborative anthropology

16:57:14 On the Mongolian Inner Asian Studies Unit which I set up, I didn't consciously set out to build an institution; the unit was really pushed at me by my co-author of the book on shamans, Urgunge Onon, who is Mongolian; he felt he was getting old, and the legacy of Owen Lattimore who had been his teacher and also mine, was being lost; there was nobody in this country who was studying Mongolian or promoting it, and it was my duty to do something about it; pushed by him, we did set up this unit; at that point, provided you had a rationale and wrote a convincing letter, Cambridge allowed one to set one up; it became an identifiable small group and grew from that; the idea behind it was not just that there needed to be some younger people who knew about that area of the world; because the Mongols inhabit the middle of a huge land mass they are subject to many influences and very difficult to understand if you only know one bit of this; to really understand Mongolia you have to know Chinese; to read the literature on Mongolia you have to read Russian; to know the history you have to know Turkish and Persian; a collaboration of lots of people in one unit is the only way that one can do a decent job on working in that bit of the world; I really do believe that; that was the idea behind having a unit, and it has been very successful; on language, I have Russian, Mongolian, and when I worked in Nepal I did know some Nepali; I also worked in India for a time and Nepali was pretty close; I went to Rajasthan at a point when I was a Junior Lecturer, which in Cambridge was a turnover position; I wanted to stay in Cambridge and Jack Goody, who was Head of Department at the time, said that I could not get tenure if I was just going to study Mongolia as it was not a taught area; he suggested I study somewhere in South Asia, and I went to Nepal assuming it was in South Asia; I did fieldwork there, came back, and to my dismay Jack said that wasn't what he meant; at this point I gritted my teeth and went to India and worked on the Jains in Rajasthan, which I have never regretted

21:45:18 I have supervised between forty and forty-five graduate students over the years; much of the time there have been as many as ten at the same time; I was always very happy to work with graduate students and I think it is one of the most enjoyable things I have done with my life; I have been blessed with some wonderful students, so many brilliant people, almost none have I not actually enjoyed supervising; quite a few worked in India; the work I did on the Jains resulted in several people working there; I had a few students from Korea, quite a lot on various parts of Russia, and more recently I had a batch of people coming from Denmark, most of whom are now teaching there; one of them worked in Cuba, and three in Mongolia; I think Edmund's slightly hands-off technique of not trying to impose too much, being available, and putting in the right word at a certain moment about something exciting a student could read, but really leaving it to them, making clear that they must do it; this seems to result in people growing in their work, and finding parts of themselves they hadn't really quite expected; also identifying with their own work because it is all theirs, not me who has pushed it into them; they have a real sense of owning that work and being the author of something new; it sometimes takes a long time because if you are not pushing people they work at their own pace; there is no usual time, some of them whizz through in three or four years, and some take eight; I suspect the average is five years

26:09:23 When I was younger, I particularly enjoyed undergraduate supervisions, and did a lot of it; in those days I felt instinctively on the same wave length as the students, but I was still supervising last year and enjoyed it; I have to admit I don't really enjoy lecturing; I don't like the mode of just standing up with only one person talking at a room full of people for nearly an hour; the way it is in Cambridge is extremely concentrated, you have got to get information over and the students want it to be like that, so there isn't much option for slowing down or changing the format to be more conversational; I have tried different ways of teaching; I once tried debates, also when I was lecturing on barter, getting them to play a game, bartering in little groups, but it all took too long and time whizzed by and they didn't think they had learnt anything; you are stuck with the lecture format and I can't say I really enjoy it; I do like teaching seminars and have done MPhil seminar teaching for practically my whole career, often with a colleague which is helpful; the difficult thing in that sort of seminar is that a lot of information has to be imparted, but the students come from very different backgrounds, some very knowledgeable, some knowing practically nothing about anthropology, so it is helpful to have two people teaching; the main thing is to try to engender a discussion which will make them interested and they take part in; I was Head of Department for four years; I did enjoy it though it was a challenge as I suddenly felt responsible for the whole place, from loo paper to the appointment of the next readership, what's in the syllabus to the physical plant in the department; I enjoyed trying to keep that going and improve it as best I could 30:09:15 Ernest Gellner was Head of Department for some time; he was an exciting thinker, a philosopher and not just an anthropologist; I think he had that way of sharpening ideas and focussing on things; a lot of anthropology is quite discursive and descriptive, and he was analytical and certainly an ethical thinker about all these issues; I think it did influence me a lot, not that I ever wrote that way; I did meet Clifford Geertz and admired his work, but was not much influenced by it; more recently I have been influenced by Bruno Latour; I didn't like his work for a long time, and even now don't think it is the answer to everything, but, a bit like with Ernest, I really appreciate that this is a quite grand systematic mind; he has a way of looking at the world and is unafraid to say so; we have to be logical in those ways and his is exciting work

33:17:03 As a Fellow of King's and wife of the Master of Trinity, I see these as very different colleges; they are both part of the old Cambridge College system, but in terms of atmosphere they are different; my problem in really answering the question is that I don't have the same relation to them because I am a Fellow of King's so am inside it; that is like being in a very large family, with people just arriving, but others who have retired and are still part of King's; I think Trinity is also like that but I am not part of it; the wife of the Master isn't a Fellow; I do have dining rights but it is pretty clear that one is not supposed to exercise them as though you were a member of the College; my role there is very different and is to assist Martin in what he does as Master; a lot of it is quite official, entertaining people or meeting potential sponsors and donors, going to official occasions, so I don't know the inside of Trinity as I do King's; however the general feeling is that Trinity has its own atmosphere; it is a very solid place; its motto is semper eadem, always the same, so it is happy to go on doing things and you have to have an unbelievably good reason to change anything, whereas I don't think King's has ever been like that; I was very much tempted to go to University College London a few years ago; I didn't, partly because Martin is here and it would have made life more difficult, but also because Marilyn Strathern, who was Head of Department at the time, persuaded me to stay in Cambridge; I think I had thought it was time for a change but at that point there were not many people about my age in the department in my position, and I think she felt she needed another relatively senior person around, so I stayed; I have been happy in Cambridge; I think it is important from my point of view to have a place that you know really well if you are going to a lot of different countries and having immense networks in many places where you are unfamiliar and having to find your way; it is good to be able to retreat to somewhere where you know practically every paving stone