A NOTE From THE EDITOR, THUPPAHI
From unknown reasons and/or my incompetence, I cannot locate the Web-Reference for this item or the date. However this is the first in a seres of posts which will feature Bruce KAPFERER who I interacted with closely from the early 1970s; and who was the ‘force’ that gave me a job in the Dept of Anthropology, Adelaide University in 1978. I have taken the liberty of highlighting ‘key’ elements in this reveiw. I willalso be adding other WEB Items and a personal tale on this dynamic figure in the world of scocial science.
Details
| Collection ID (SN): | 6226 |
| Title: | Pioneers of Social Research, 1996-2018 |
| Principal investigator: | Thompson, P., University of Essex, Department of Sociology |
| Sex: | Male |
| Age group: | 65-74 |
| Socio-economic status: | Higher managerial/admin/professional |
| Region: | London |
| Licence: | Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Licence. |
interview summary
| I: | Born June 4, 1940 Sydney, Australia. An only child. |
| I: | Father French, worked for the New York Herald Tribune |
| I: | Father met mother on a ship while on his way to Australia in 1939 before the outbreak of the Second World War, to cover the development of the war situation in the Pacific with Japan and the US. When war broke out in Northern Europe father joined the Australian Army and married his mother. |
| I: | Mother was from a rural Australia family. She didn’t have much education because she had to leave school early. She was from an Anglo-Irish background. This is how he got his name Bruce. |
| I: | Father’s family in France were divided between Jewish and Catholic families. Some went to the US and some to the UK but he has no contact with them. |
| I: | Parents’ work: Father was demobilized from the Army and at first didn’t work after that. Mother worked making gloves until Bruce was about four or five, and periodically worked in Post Offices to supplement the family income. |
| I: | The family lived in a one room basement flat in Australia when father became demobilized and with financial help from father’s sister, father began a business importing continental films (French and Italian movies) to Australia. For this he became the pioneer for the development of the foreign film industry in Australia and was often written up as important for the civilising of Australia (this encouraged Australians to become interested in other countries and different languages etc.). |
| I: | Father’s business folded due to the development of television and the control of cinemas by big corporations who then controlled the distribution of films mainly from the US, which saw the end of films form elsewhere. After business collapsed father ended up as a ‘messenger boy’. |
| I: | Father was unhappy living in Australia and he went with his wife back to France for a year, but returned because mother was not happy living there. |
| I: | Early interest: Listening to father’s worries over his job turned him away from business and towards an interest in anthropology – archaeology specifically. He read books on archaeology widely as a child, and father encouraged that. Both his parents encouraged him to go on to higher education. |
| I: | Education: At Sydney University there were no courses in archaeology or physical anthropology. He studied history, psychology and philosophy at first and then anthropology a bit later. |
| I: | He did a four-year Honours Degree in anthropology and wrote a dissertation on Fiji Indians, with a Singhalese supervisor called Chandra Jay. [This refers to CHANDRA JAYAWARDENA] |
| I: | Chandra Jay who had been working with Fiji Indians encouraged him to apply for a grant to study in British Central Africa, where Max Gluckmann from Manchester school of Anthropology had been conducting research with people such as Elizabeth Coulson, Clyde Mitchell, Vic Turner, Bill Epstein, Bill Watson, Ian Collerson etc. |
| I: | Bruce went from Australia on a Commonwealth Scholarship of £600.00 per year, registered with the LSE for an MA. Max Gluckmann had been developing the Rhodes Livingstone Institute, originally in Salisbury and then in Lusaka. Bruce and others such as Peter Fry went first to Salisbury on a Commonwealth Scholarship to be in the Anthropology Department which had people like Clyde Mitchell. With support from the Colonial Social Research Council, a small group of them went and worked in what was then Northern Rhodesia, and he worked in a swamp region near the Congo, in a town called Tubway, in a zinc mining town in what became Zambia (formerly Northern Rhodesia). |
| I: | It was during this period that the unilateral Declaration of Independence took place. He remained with the Rhodes Livingstone Institute (whose then Director was Elizabeth Coulson), which was now in Lusaka where he conducted his MA project in a zinc factory. Another project (on the Zambian clothing factory run by Sri Lankan managers) ended up as a PhD (1969) and he published a book from this work. |
| I: | He remained in Zambia for three years doing research in the zinc factory and various kinds of research on the fishing economy and women’s labour groups. He was married at the time, and is still married to the same person. |
| I: | It was in Africa that he learned about politics, and in his current work he is writing about the destabilization by a whole range of re-movement out of Colonial Rule, and how the corporations have been very much at the forefront of destabilizing all kinds of political structures in Zambia. |
| I: | He experienced culture shock upon his arrival in Zambia in 1963 during the dying days of Colonialism (Zambian independence was in 1964), coming from the egalitarian and individualistic Australian society, and having no knowledge about South Africa at the time (Northern/Southern Rhodesia were the first extension of what was then apartheid South Africa). Practices such as the colour bar, social hierarchy, and servant-type population were things he had never encountered before, and he found this shocking. |
| I: | While in Africa he did research on the political economy of the Bemba-speaking Bisa people in the Bangweulu Swamps. He also did urban research in both the commercial and mining areas of Broken Hill from 1964 – March 1966, inspired by Godfrey Wilson who had studied there. His research in Broken Hill was meant to be a follow-on from Godfrey Wilson. |
| I: | He left Broken Hill in 1966 to take up an Assistant Lectureship in the Anthropology Department at University of Manchester where he taught and did his PhD (on the Zambian clothing factory project – see above). |
| I: | Work life: From Manchester he went on to do research in Sri Lanka; one on international migration and businesses of a small caste and fisher community in southern Sri Lanka. Here trade among fishermen developed from selling trinkets to people on passing ships, to opening big jewellery shops all around the world. Consequently the community became very wealthy and important in internal politics in Sri Lanka…. {They were mostly Karava; MRoberts] |
| I: | In Sri Lanka he also looked at healing rituals – the subject of his first book on Sri Lanka. This work became the basis of another book on nationalism, followed by another book on ritual forms. |
| I: | His work in Zambia focused on social interactions and ways of looking at social network relations. This was inspired by Clyde Mitchell’s interest in getting away from the structural-functionalist paradigm in British social anthropology. His most cited article from this period is titled ‘Norms and the Manipulation of Relationships in a Work Context’ published in in Clyde Mitchell’s Social Networks in Urban Situations. |
| I: | His work on rituals explored the ways in which relationships were differentially culturally inflicted in practice – influenced by the Manchester anthropology position with its emphasis on practice. He makes the point that interviews are important but tend to produce ‘static understandings’, whereas practice looks at things in their ‘unfolding flow’, hence his interest in rituals. |
| I: | From observing healing rituals he came to understand the centrality of women not only in the kinship structure, but ‘at the web of social relations which influenced illness’, and illness itself as a social thing. |
| I: | Speaking of difficulties he encountered in the research field, he found learning the language the most challenging thing. In terms of getting participants, arriving in Central Africa at the end of colonialism, being Australian as opposed to being English or South African was an advantage. However, although he was very well accepted, people did not give out information freely to outsiders, and he would be grilled about his intensions before getting any information. Overall he enjoyed his time in Zambia. |
| I: | Sri Lanka was a different experience for him. As an Australian he found the hierarchical caste system and the Sri Lankan respect for the English – despite their experience under British colonial rule- difficult to understand. Interestingly, however, he felt that it was because of this hierarchy and respect for the English that he found it easier to get information and work in Sri Lanka than he did in Zambia. |
| I: | He speaks about the dilemma of trying to get information beyond the interview and the suspicions that anthropologists can create from observing people’s social behaviours. For this reason, he finds it easier to work with ‘situations’ where he can observe events. |
| I: | He has not archived any of his research material because he is still working with them, but feels that when he decides to do so he will give them to the countries where he conducted the research. |
| I: | His key contributions to social science: His work on social network and the study of modern urban contexts outside the West, his work on ritual and on nationals, and his work on methodology. His work on methodology is an ongoing critique of Western systems of thought, and trying to show how Westerners have ‘produced systematic forms of misinformation‘. For example, the West has exoticised ‘sorcery’ and ‘witchcraft’, thereby missing out on the much deeper philosophical assumptions which it holds about the way in which human social relations are constructed and destroyed. Instead, he is interested in the ways in which ‘human practice inform on human practice, rather than to see research simply as collecting data which then fits into a whole series of categories which are, themselves, suspect’. |
| I: | Work before university: Before going to university, as a young man he worked as a labourer of the land as a boundary rider, and while at university he worked at nights and early mornings in a wool classing organization, as the low level worker who picked up the wool and put them in bins and onto trolleys, then up to the wool classers who would then sort it into various grades. |
| I: | Later work life: He went 1973-85 as a Foundation Professor from Manchester to Australia, back to Australia where he started the Department of Anthropology, Adelaide University, which became very famous. From there he was appointed 1985 as Chair and Head of Department at University College London. He remained at UCL until 1996 after which he went back to James Cook University, Townsville in Northern Australia where he started another Department. Due to the changes in Australia and the cuts that occurred in universities, he took up a position in Norway where he has been since 1999. He has maintained connections in England and Australia. |
| I: | Contacts with his past students: Gf Coleman who did work among aborigines in Northern Australia, Guillermo de la Peña from Mexico, other students who have become professors around the world, and students developing research centres in South India where he is doing some work. |
| I: | Family life: He married his Australian wife in 1963 before going to Zambia where she followed him while he was doing fieldwork. They currently live in Norway where she is Professor of Sociology. They have two children, a daughter who is a novelist and a son who makes documentary films. He has not influenced his children to become academics. He has four grandchildren in Australia. |
| I: | His main interests outside of work are fishing and science fiction, but anthropology is his life. He is meant to be retired now but was made a Distinguished Professor in Norway, which enables him to go anywhere and do anything so he doesn’t have to retire. |
| I: | His proudest achievements: Establishing Departments of Anthropology and believing he has had an effect on the development of anthropology, and in being influential in the establishment of various anthropological publications. He is also proud of his books and the students he has taught. He has established a new Research Institute in Northern Australia. Overall he is very pleased with influencing the development of social research in various places. |
