BRUCE KAPFERER Interviewed by Bjørn Enge Bertelsen, …. date not up front
Photo by Andy Lewis.
Moving at the margins to re-center anthropology. From having been supervised by Bruce Kapferer and having worked on and off with him since 1999, I knew that pinning him down long enough to interview him would be hard. After weeks of failed attempts, I finally became lucky in November 2010 when I managed to abduct him to my office. This strategic re-location was necessary to escape the constant ringing of telephones in his office as well as his office’s avalanche-prone ever-expanding piles of papers and books. All verbal encounters with Bruce are characterised by a direct, critical and engaging dialogue – as also documented in other interviews (see esp. Smedal 2000). This rang true also for the dynamic of the interview situation, so only after five minutes of discussing critically recent developments in anthropology did I succeed in posing my initial question.
