How does an idea relate to one’s day-to-day reality, the work to a life? These questions are usually obscured in academic discourse, because the scholar’s own life is not investigated; their mental apparatus taken for granted, it is believed handed down by God or Charles Darwin. But is so? In a remarkable series of interviews Alan Macfarlane puts this belief to the test; it is an ethnography of his own profession.

Alan suggested I write a few pieces about these interviews, which we have decided to collect into a book. This is one of the chapters. More are to be written, and will appear here; while some can be found on Serenity Science, which gives the background to the project.

As I write the book the theme is becoming clear to me. In the early years of the 20th-century anthropology was a new discipline, and in attracting the odd and the outsider created new ways of thinking about the human and their social relations. Then over time the subject slides into the university mainstream, so losing its originality. My book describes this change and tries to explain it. The style is typical Schloss: serious but playful, I’m a cat with my scholarly mice….

This interview is with an anthropologist who still embodies the old virtues of exploration and adventure. I hope you enjoy it. I know I did!

I know this is going to be special. Something about the opening remarks; a certain tone, that aristocratic aloofness, an insouciance, which promises many things. Difficult to pin down, it is paradoxical, because although suggesting the insider, it assumes we already know much of what he knows; it’s taken for granted that we too are sophisticates, players of the same game. This why so much isn’t said; we to pick up the meaning through our mental senses; cut grass in a Spring breeze. All in the club. All know the territory to the last bush and dandelion. Though it is more than this. What is talked about isn’t something to be learnt, a monograph off the library shelf, but life; a life where we only just get to our destination, on a rickety bus, in a leaking boat, through a mad flight in a dodgy plane. Such things are what one is expected to have experienced, during the course of an eventful existence; so well within the compass of you, me and Piers Vitebsky, the interviewer. This man is generous. He gives us his history, and we partake of its vast riches, to become a member of his court. So easy to think of Round Tables, knights and chivalric quests…. I feel the confidence of authority; that privilege of an elite, who home anywhere, are sure that everyone - high and low - are listening to them. Robert Paine had thought of becoming a colonial officer. No wonder! Instead, he chose anthropology. A perfect choice. Made for it.

As with many, he is an anthropologist by accident. The subject, low on the degree lists, is often discovered by chance, when the student is seeking employment or post-graduate study. In Robert’s case a course ‘drops’ out of the Oxford prospectus. It is the winning lottery ticket.

Empire official. Anthropologist. Adventurer. Not much to choose between them in those days; the ratio of bohemianism to orthodoxy in their characters to decide the career option. Wanting to study Eskimos our man goes to Lapland, to do research for his supervisor, Franz Steiner. But how he goes! Using his mother’s inheritance, he takes a boat from Grimsby to Tromso, and then works for his keep in the coastal towns for two years. After spending time in Oxford to write up his notes, he returns and travels into the interior, where he learns the Saami language from an old man. After a chance meeting he becomes an assistant to a reindeer herder for eleven months. Only on his next visit is there a proper study. First you live as a native, the academic study light or non-existent; only afterwards to put on the tweed jacket and scholarly gown. It’s what Schopenhauer recommends for all education: experience first, then the books. Because thought must have original material to work on, it shouldn’t coast on the ideas of others, but should rough it out with the senses. This produces an integrated intellectual life.1 It is why, I suspect, Robert Paine disagrees with Keith Hart on nomadic culture: for Robert this combination of private ownership of a herd and collective use of the commons devastates the common land; for no-one is responsible for its preservation. However, polemics is not what this man or piece is about. To live on one’s wits, to shape oneself around the surroundings, is just the sort of behaviour I’d expect from the clever and adventurous upper class; raised to go out into the world, these are natural improvisors; with a confidence in their own powers, a security of the self, on whose good sense and authority they can rely.2 Bred to lead, to make decisions, to survive, little fazes these chaps, who know by instinct what to do.

It’s shame we don’t learn anything of his background, not even the social class of his parents. This an early interview, done before the format was set and the academic work was situated within the individual’s life. My ideas are therefore speculations, imagined from what I see on screen. But am I really flying over Africa thinking it Greenland? Is Oxford such a miraculous place that it transforms a man’s geography overnight?3 Alan to the rescue: once upon a time the British public system trained for character rather than brains.4 Class formed by classroom as much as in the cot.

Let’s take a pitstop.

So I can ruminate a general point about the academic personality. It is remarkable how often we see the private excised from the portrait; the ‘I’ surrendering itself up to the ideas and institutions of a profession. This the true, the debilitating, bias of social science and the humanities, rather than the usual campus suspects; for such a bias, in erasing the self out of the picture, misreads the nature of society; so that a social organism, populated by people and touched by their individual actions, is transformed into an abstract, impersonal and collective realm, where individuals are thought at best as epiphenomena. Poor history! when it kowtows to the diktats of a Zeitgeist or the commands of the language generals, whose troops are Class, Sex and Race.5 Not Sieyès or Louis LXVI responsible for the French Revolution but the Bourgeoisie or Culture or Modernity or Myth…. Such approaches are apt to get the causal relationship the wrong way round, especially in major events like a revolution, which are directed by outstanding characters - the thinkers, the intellectuals, leaders and orators - who have the ability to flow with the madness and shape it around their own personalities.6 If the charismatics, crazies and virtuosos are written out of the story, we are left with abstract forces and conceptual Geister; which explain little but the preoccupations of an academic mind, bent to the wind of the latest fashion. Quiet study in libraries and archives, where reasons are dusted down, and causes polished up on an Apple Mac, has replaced the arguing and shouting in beerhall and barracks. So much is missed. Individuals an uncomfortable presence in ‘serious’ scholarship for they bring a touch of the unpredictable and the unknowable into a scene; a reminder that many of the key historical events are determined(!) by chance and best described by narrative. Concepts and categories often to hide the realities rather than elucidate them. It is why for all the revolutionary rhetoric of our day - change! change! change! is the word-disease disfiguring campus websites - the academic sensibility is a strangely conformist one; the conservatism of the lifestyle reflected in the epistemological behaviours, which define knowledge as the general and the theoretical, which in turn produces a mentality prone to ideological fashion, which exaggerates this sensibility, through oiling its analytical wheels. One reason why Alan’s interviews are so illuminating - dare I say radical? - for they implicitly question an assumption which frames much of academic thought: that the subjective is something to be avoided; that one must hang up the ‘I’ when we don the white coat of the scientist; as if science the best model to study a human society.7

Pitstop over!

Outside the empire, Lapland isn’t a prestige project. Therefore little (no) money to pay for his trip, which he funds himself. This says something not just about Robert Paine but about the subject, and possibly higher education more generally, in those days; that one did these things out of an instinct; it wasn't a calculated career option, or a job.8 The spirit of the enterprise is different, less a research project than an adventure; a wilful step into the unknown. This why character so important. Such strong personalities to shape the subject, which is enchanted with the life of each anthropologist. I add this enormous side benefit: a respect for individuals. Respect. Show it, and you are halfway there to understanding another person. Robert tells his students not to flash their grant money around; and urges them to use the locals’ bedding not their own sleeping bags. The closer to a people’s life, the closer you are to the people you are studying, until, as with Meyer Fortes, you are almost one with them.9 It is sound advice, which collapses the distinction between knowledge and experience. But I wonder how many of his students spent years doing manual labour - house building, the wheat harvest, cod fishing. I suspect that even if wanting to, the grant conditions wouldn’t allow it; the discipline moving into a tighter, more organised, more mainstream, a scholastic, direction. This anthropologist more participant than observer. Indeed, after nearly three years of such native work, he had to come back to do a proper academic job for his D.Phil. No campus in sight. Our man closer to a novelist than a scholar (think of how many novelists, especially in the early years, work in low-paid jobs); which I suggest is the reason for his own peculiar take on his subject area, his insights fed by his openness to outsiders and a willingness to engage with their livelihoods.10 One day he is accused of being a typical academic: ‘the problem with you anthropologists is that you don’t study what’s staring you in the face’. Robert takes up the challenge; and writes a book on Joseph Smallwood, Newfoundland’s boss man. This an academic who thinks about the world as he in acts in it.

He is not afraid to act, even when he knows it is tricky and will cause him problems; will compromise his scholarly integrity. When close to a people, there are times the objective has to give way to the subjective; scholarship to leave the field to moral concerns and tribal loyalties. It is when the half-truths of social intercourse replace the whole truths of an anthropological monograph.

The problem of advocacy. Asked to adjudicate an academic appointment, between a young Saami ethnographer and two Norwegian historians, in a North Norway fraught with identity controversies, he analyses out his decision, putting himself - as the outsider – squarely in the frame. Brought in to navigate around these dangerous political rocks; he will take the hit if this selection boat sinks. So play safe then…. Ha! Perhaps only Robert could decide to reject all candidates, leaving the position open. This couldn’t have been easy, given that the post was a symbol of local pride. Only an aristocrat perhaps to have the confidence….

This history is briefly told. A small university, to increase its own prestige and to support Saami culture, where identity has become a politically sensitive issue, upgrades the role of museum curator to professor. It is assumed only locals to apply for the post. Such simple souls! Out for advert the complexities of the social immediately intrude; and the competing demands of ethnography, politics, and culture clash in a choice of candidates. There is no simple solution, because the post, created for political-academic reasons, cannot be decided just on academic grounds, for it must negotiate between incommensurate qualities: scholarly excellence against cultural insiderdom. Cocooned within a provincial mentality the (obvious) consequences were not considered; these provincials obtuse to national conditions, the intense competition for academic appointments. They should have known that such a prestigious title would attract candidates from outside Saami territory; and that some of these - the historians – are unlikely to think like natives (or Robert Paine). It is the self-defeating nature of local pride. Add the weakness of identity politics, where the demands of ideology, excellence, idealism and self-interest are almost impossible to reconcile. Call in the outsider! An impartial eye, and most importantly, someone to carry the can, if all goes wrong. Of course Robert is their choice! All the bad blood to be loaded on the back of a foreigner, who carries it away with a will.

Maybe Robert’s decision was right - it feels right - but the issue here is not truth but politics, and its social consequences in feeling and self-interest. Such decisions best made less by a scholar than a man of the world who knows his business. Our man the man for this job.

Just how complex are these competing claims – even under the heaviest of relativist fire Robert wants to keep his scholarly head – is shown in another case. The Saami herders ask him to speak against the Norwegian government’s proposal to build a dam on ancestral lands. As an advocate he can’t be impartial; and yet an urge to be fair will have its say; thus his admission to the court that if the Saami had the decision and the revenue they would accept the dam; so destroying the mythic-spiritual defence of the case. That said, the Saami themselves supported his act; for he laid down the principle of political ownership and a just revenue.

In present times, when anthropologists see themselves as primarily advocates, Robert’s experience is a cautionary tale. It takes far more than knowledge to work on somebody’s else’s behalf.

Iago Prytherch knocks on my door.11

Dreams clustering thick on his sallow skull,
Dark as curls, he comes, ambling with his cattle
From the starved pastures. He has shaken from off his shoulders
The weight of the sky, and the lash of the wind’s sharpness
Is healing already under the medicinal sun.
Clouds of cattle breath, making the air heady,
Remember the summer’s sweetness, the wet road runs
Blue as river before him; the legendary town
Dreams of his coming; under the half-closed lids
Of the indolent shops sleep dawdles, emptying the last 
Tankards of darkness, before the officious light 
Bundles it up the chimney out of sight.

The shadow of the mountain dwindles; his scaly eye
Sloughs its cold care and glitters. The day is his
To dabble a finger in, and merry as crickets,
A chorus of coins sings in his tattered pockets.
Shall we follow him down, witness his swift undoing
In the indefinite streets: the sudden disintegration
Of his soul’s hardness, traditional discipline
Of flint and frost thawing in ludicrous showers
Of maudlin laughter; the limpid runnels of speech
Sullied and slurred, as the beer-glass chimes the hours?
No, wait for him here. At midnight he will return,
Threading the tunnel that contains the dawn
Of all his fears. Be then his fingerpost
Homeward. The earth is patient; he is not lost.

The Welsh hill farmer versus the Welsh village. A similar relationship exists between Saami reindeer herders and Saami town dwellers. In the coastal towns, Saami culture and language is denigrated by the Saami themselves, who identify with Norway, the carrier of modernity and its respectable mores. For urbanites Saami identity is too closely associated with the herders, whose wild ways and ‘barbaric’ ethics, those riotous invasions - reindeer rampage the local fields, the men the town’s women – are to be dismissed not celebrated (it is why they wouldn’t teach Robert the language). Add the arrogance, whose coin is money - skins are expensive – and the sense of their own nobility - tough barbarians look down on effete gentlefolk – and this reaction is obvious. I think of Evans-Pritchard’s Nuer; who with almost nothing except cattle believed themselves the lords of creation. Robert supplies the reason: nobody rules over them. Free men in a society of equals; each their own knight in their own court. An honour society, where honour is its own protection and curse – each meeting an event where one’s image is at stake.

Pride and self-esteem are so important to human flourishing.12 This often overlooked by missionaries, who are apt to put their own ideas of the good life before the psychological concerns of those they purportedly save. Nor is it easy in nation-states, where the State is supposed to have a monopoly on the legals.

The herders have their own forms of justice, which are not understood by the authorities, who mistake retribution - the handicapping or removal of a rival’s reindeer for overgrazing - as a crime (theft or wilful damage). Such a mismatch between local justice and national law produces much comic incident; Robert giving us an hilarious account of a court case, where both parties have an interpreter, even though the Saami speak Norwegian. Little people always find a way of cutting big people down below their size…ridicule usually the most effective method.13 During the trial both parties regularly correct the interpreter; while at the trial’s climax both overwhelm judge and jury with technical details about reindeer markings…less to win the case, it seems, than to mock these dunderheads of the judiciary. What good fun! There’s a party afterwards to celebrate their mockery of the central authorities, their bonehead ignorance.14

Here is an issue that the nation-state tends to elide, as it strives for a monopoly over the mores of its citizens. This urge to homogeneity destroys ways of life that need their own ethics to manage a culture that has not only evolved over centuries, but has produced a vast amount of freedom that modern customs and techniques find difficult to handle.15 Alas, new kids on the block don't like listening to old arguments and ancient stories. They have the tools to bring everybody into line. The result: the weakening and eventual demise of a moral tradition that supports a social ecosphere, which dries up, becomes fragile, when all that rich historical soil is removed.16

The superstitions of the past give way to a superstition about the future.

It is why identity politics are such an issue; though this produces its own paradoxes. A traditional way of life uses the new social mechanisms, like political parties and cultural ideologies, to preserve a social entity that is in fact alien to them. Custom is replaced by idea; a collective identity to come before competing individuals; the relationship with the State to replace that of family and tribe. Now add those problems peculiar to identity politics: not every Saami, as we have seen, identifies as such. Indeed, it appears that the majority - they live in towns – dislike the strident views of their representatives, who tilt towards the herdsmen. Danger! Danger! A political programme is accepted by the central authorities that prejudices most of the locals; and this almost inevitable because (modern) politics prefers the ideological cartoon to the messy realism of a life as actually lived.

Only an insider can really know the score. It is why Sir Knowledge must be very careful when treading on Mr Experience’s toes.

A community on the fringes of a society is often treated with scorn and ridicule; I think of South Wales for much of the 20th-century, where the miners were considered little more than beasts.17 The picture is, need I say, different inside these communities; the image of barbarian and backwoodsman parodied or exaggerated when in the company of officials or enemies; while the lifestyle’s actual virtues are prized as unique signs of honour, symbols of difference, even attributes of a higher character.18 This a booby-trap for the ‘do-gooder’ seeking to improve the local’s lot; for the very conditions of poverty are the means through which that self-esteem is nurtured; it comes from the rigours of survival and the hardships of self-reliance.19 Untie the knots and the net unravels….

the sudden disintegration/Of his soul’s hardness…

Societies are integrated unities, albeit that integration varies from the very loose to the extremely tight; so that change in one area produces all sorts of unintended consequences in others. This why we should be extremely careful about social transformation. Change just a few key variables and an entire society can fall apart. Alas, it is progressives, so confident in their ideas and virtue, who tend to do the most damage; for they are apt to project quite simple and reductive concepts onto a multifarious social scene. Then there is the concentration on material improvements, that rarely considers, until it is too late, their psychological consequences. Moreover, when a community goes under, a certain social flexibility is lost, and the natives have to rely on the institutions, which are too clunky and obtuse to meet the emotional needs of the clientele. John Gray describes the breakdown in community relationships following the slum clearance in the North East. Moved to brand new homes; physical comfort was increased at the expense of the human connections that animate a life, weakening the community’s internal controls: previously it was neighbours not the police or social workers who managed the children.20 A certain collective spirit is taken out of the situation. Of course, the bureaucrats think to create a substitute for this; it is the resident participation industry that has grown up in and around local authorities and housing associations; where well-paid middle-class professionals encourage volunteers to organise themselves.

What was once natural and came from below is now artificial, and is introduced from the top; and tends to be organised less around the needs of the locals than the processes of the organisation. The ironies can be horrific, but I will spare you them for now.

This why the beneficiaries of such idealistic largesse will diss its proponents and actors (‘do-gooders’ was not a term of praise in my milieu). Robert alludes to this attitude when he says the Norwegian Labour Party doesn’t consider the Saami. The party thinks in terms of national progress, where improvements are measured in material terms. Any resistance to these ‘improvements’ considered conservative or reactionary; even though it is beliefs and ideas that situate the self in the world; thus to dismiss somebody’s ideas is its own kind of tyranny. I describe a common tale. Too many of the poor, the mad, the fringe, become the victims of progressive intellectuals and activists who, thinking to capture complex social forms within very simple concepts, have no interest in trying to understand what we actually think and do. Sort out the material conditions and all to be well. It rarely is. The Saami. The South Welsh. The Geordies. Abstractions not people. To be moved around at will. Even pawns on a chessboard have more security, since what can be done to them is restricted by the rules of the game. Queen Concept steps off the board any time she likes.

Another pitstop.

How much of our mental health crisis is the result of such insouciance with Western lives, the foregrounding of material comfort at the expense psychic exercise?21 The Schloss leans into my ear….

The mechanics too quick for my friend, I drive safely back into the race.

Anthropology, especially when practiced by the adventurous, submerges the self into alien modes of life; which requires a distance from one’s own morals, that are apt to restrict thought and feeling.22 This raises a question of class and personality: is it only an aristocrat, a bohemian, the artist, who can truly understand the foreign? Only they with the plasticity to absorb strange and uncomfortable material, while also making it their own? The secret is improvisation; to go with a feeling, to rely on instinct, opening a mind out beyond the bounds of one's preconceptions and a fashionable idea.23 Great anthropologists are the empiricists of the everyday.24

So much depends on character. Albeit Mr Luck is always hanging about. Here he hands Robert an entrance ticket to anthropology; later he gives him the gift of a moribund department at St John’s University in Newfoundland: leaders like to start at the bottom. Mr Luck feeds off character, which creates situations where he can drop in: how many to have taken that boat at Grimsby? Or turned a tiny department in a major anthropological centre. Robert Paine is a virtuoso, an artist of the social situation; able to think up new ways to run old things; at St John’s he uses an associated institute to attract top researchers; sets up a publisher; becomes an editor…give this chap two semi-colons and he’ll squeeze just enough space to conduct an experiment. He takes chances. Another secret: to have the confidence to risk one’s life and livelihood. It is those times we switch off the mind or use it to serve our impulses. Most academics are not like this. Robert is a natural leader, he has an instinct for adventure. It the strength and sinuousness of his personality.

You don’t believe me? Intoxicated by an abstract egalitarianism; tipped Kant into your cornflakes, have you….

Ok, listen to Robert. He spent an incredible six years at Bergen with Frederik Barth. The youngest of the bunch, Barth exerted the most influence, and created an immensely fertile and cohesive group, centred around the seminar, run under his guidance. Character. It creates its own magic when it belongs to wizards like Barth and Malinowski. But then Max Weber knew this…. ‘But he was an academic’, says Herr Schloss. Was he? Is this a really a description of a library cormorant:

Marianne praises Max Weber’s ‘precocious ability to sympathise and empathise even with qualities that were far removed from his own nature’. By no means did he display this ability in every situation, but he certainly did have it in personal as well as academic life. Honigheim even portrays him as a virtuoso of understanding: Weber’s capacity for empathetic interpretation of human behaviour was indeed…unlimited’.25

Are we not talking artist….

Weber’s career clearly demonstrates that he achieved the breakthrough to creativity at moments when he was able to combine his research with strong emotional experiences of his own.26

The quotations are piling up. Here’s another one to climb over: it clinches the argument.

Everywhere in Weber’s work we come across passages which, on close examination, gain their clarity and accuracy neither from pure logic nor from the sources he quotes, but only from an element of emotional sensitivity…. Weber continually demonstrates a special gift for the construction of tense connections that derive not from pure logic but from a passionate recapturing of experience.

Characteristic of Weber is not only his own scientific passion but also his special feeling for the element of passion in all things human: this is not the least of the reasons why his work always has something exciting about it. His major writings point to the premise that everything great in the world springs from passion. Towards the end of his inaugural lecture in Freiburg, he declares that a man is ‘young as long as he is able to find the great passions that nature has implanted in us’ - passion as a natural element, the best element, in man! And twenty-four years later, in ‘Science as a Vocation’, it is again his credo: ‘For nothing is worthy of man as man unless he can pursue it with passionate devotion.’ Since he felt himself to be a passionate man, this suggests that Weber saw himself as having a special natural feeling for the driving forces of existence.27

Though in many ways a magnificent biography, my original animus against Joachim Radkau’s massive tome was a reaction to what I felt was the author’s idée fixe on Weber’s psycho-sexual life as the explanation for his breakdowns. Also a slight irritation with the Monsieur Plod style - witness that last sentence. My annoyance increasing as the pages accumulated through my fingers. Throwing the book on the sofa, I’d jump up and down on the living-room floor and shout: ‘You’re missing it!’ And much else, that is not repeatable.28 What’s he missing? That Weber is an artist; his mental collapses due to the ‘iron cage’ of academia; its narrow rationality suffocating his vast and amorphous sensibility. Weber’s natural environment - German bohemia, which Radkau describes in detail - should have been the clue. Of course he missed it; the very idea that the academic life is an illness…no no; let me try this metaphor: university is a sanatorium, where creative lights switched off, they are left to an insane darkness.

Before returning to Robert, a few words on the Seminar. Barth suggests something special about this academic activity; that is an intellectual catalyst; an institutional version of the age-old relationship of guru and disciple; the teacher’s influence produced as much through their physical presence, a force of personality, as their ideas.29 Has the nature of the seminar - I think of Malinowski, I think of Firth - been adequately studied, as a vehicle for Weberian charisma? A Weber who knew the guru, the artist, from the inside.

Gay chalks and a blackboard. Watch Kate trace
Four fish. They hover softly in dark space,

Warming the kitchen by their tranquil glow,
Infallible, heraldic. Pictures flow

With casual extravagance, to live
Assured as flowers, and as fugitive.

These lack all claim or pretext; merely say:
Here is a world, and it behaves this way.

They mock our making by their candour; lift
Our hesitant, blunt senses; are true gift

For Rilke’s Angels. Knowing our task is
To feed the invisible with our images, 

We rub the blackboard clear: four fish allow
To swim in darker space more subtly now.

30 Robert calls Barth’s work an art. The reason, I would argue, for the Norwegian’s genius and Robert’s own insights. These two think and act less like academics than writers and poets; alive to the feel of a moment, they absorb nuances of personality and atmosphere, as a river soaks up rain. The senses are quicker than the abstract mind; which in most academics is apt to get in the way: ‘let me have my idea, then I can think about the subject….’ Which of course means the subject is never seen on its own terms. Trust the senses, their instincts and intuitions! It is why Barth, like Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf, could intuit strange cultures so rapidly; a whole being to vibrate with the resonances from a person, a village, the whole culture.31 To feel it rather than think it. Character again: it is to let the self go, to flow with the scene, lose one’s bearings to the material, for minutes, hours, even weeks on end.32 How many have the confidence to trust their instincts; to give up all their ideas? Only the artist and the adventurer (add the madman and fool) to be foolish or wise enough to do so.

I give the example of myself. In a pub with a group of friends from work; when suddenly The Flindall is throwing a punch at my face. I don’t move. The fist stops millimetres from my nose. This surprises The Flindall…his ‘Zen koan’ has found a fool who passes the wiseman’s test. Trust. To trust others, to trust the situation, to trust one’s self; these perhaps the hardest lessons to learn; because so much relies on the senses, our mind’s microscopes. The Schloss peeps in: ‘aren’t you likely to be taken for a ride?’ Trust is different from innocence, which tends to ignore the senses rather than to rely on them. I ask The Flindall to come over and have a ‘word’ with my friend….

Education can blunt the senses, while the mind becomes top-heavy with concepts. When in the field, anthropologists should be intellectual guerrillas, carrying the lightest of theoretical loads; allowing for a swift change in mental direction and the quick flight of an insight. Regular troops, with a big bibliographies on their backs, aren’t so clever in a jungle.33

Rational free-spirits are the light brigade who go on ahead and reconnoitre the ground which the heavy brigade of the orthodox will eventually occupy.34

On a visit to Israel, Robert scratches that ethnographic itch. However, it’s too late to learn Hebrew - he’s sixty by now - so he finds a subject where the language is less of an obstacle: the occupied West Bank, where many settlers are English speakers (straight out of New York). Fresh situations fresh approaches…I almost said methods; but this is not Robert’s way; he works with hunches; like Robert Wyatt at the keyboard, our Robert scratches around for (well not notes, but) facts, ideas, articulate men and women. From the get-go he is testing hypotheses. He starts with Mary Douglas’s concept of pollution and applies it to a prisoner exchange in Lebanon. ‘No no, that’s rubbish’, he is told; his interlocutors going on to explain what is actually happening. Some speak to him in English, others are heard through an interpreter: surely taboo for a modern anthropologist? Who cares! This academic isn’t going to follow the academic rules. Of course not! He creates his own, to discover odd truths in odd places through odd means. Working outside conventional lines - but using scholars to test his conclusions - Robert comes up with interesting ideas on what had become (for liberals) outré material.35

There are two big ideas. Totemic time and fact invention. What is totemic time? Israel and the West Bank exist in a biblical chronology which is set not by the clock but by the pronouncements of God.36 The era between the Roman expulsion and modern Israel therefore doesn't exist; it is erased by reading the holy scriptures. Nearly two thousand years…a large history book with most of the pages ripped out. This gives a radically new (and disturbing) version of what is going on in the West Bank, where the land itself is worshipped as divine.37 This Zionism less orthodox Judaism, with its worship of the Book (Bible, Talmud, Torah) as a return to the idol cults of Baal, such a feature of Temple and pre-Temple times.38 Time is decided not by minutes and seconds but by words. An archaic way of looking at the temporal order in the most modern of modern societies; and which makes ordinary politicking very difficult indeed; especially as this aspect tends to be ignored in mainstream coverage. Inventing facts? When dealing with more powerful foes you cannot rely on the existing laws and customs; so you bend them to your ends. You create your own realities, and try to get others to believe in them. Under Ottoman law, land could be acquired if walls and a roof were put up overnight. This clause was used, many would say abused, during the British mandate to extend Jewish settlement in Palestine. Real houses and villages created where none by rights should exist. Once get into the habit of inventing facts, it becomes a policy instrument; it has been used to massively extend the settler territories in the West Bank; and is now a tactic that plays across all of Israeli political and diplomatic life.

Robert admits there are moral qualms about such research: ‘I know the occupation is illegal’. How deal with this problem? Tut tut and look the other way, signing the occasional petition; giving verbal sanctions to demos and rallies…or should the settlers be understood? Of course, it is not either/or; academia needs to be open enough to include those like Robert who cross the moral borders to look at the dark side. But Robert belongs to a dying breed of academic. It is not just the campus-wide support for the Palestinians, with its almost visceral dislike of Israel; today’s professors are indistinguishable from bureaucrats, with their ethics of the Procedure and an egalitarianism of the Process.39 No place for aristocrats. Adventurers are escorted off campus by security guards.

Not a guitarist in a covers band, Robert Paine is a jazzman, able to improvise at all times and on any street corner. A difficult man for bureaucrats and officials to hold down once he gets on top - as head of department at St John’s. Inevitably, such a sensibility casts its quizzical gaze at his surroundings. Prompted by a layman to look at Robert Smallwood, he writes a book about an election where a prominent liberal tried to unseat this local Big Man. It has a wonderful title: Tyrants and Turkey Trots. His independent eye then stays a while to scan the northern reaches of Canada. What it sees is welfare colonialism; the use of churches, schools and health services to make the indigenous peoples dependent on the White Man. Never allowed to grow up. This touches a nerve…it is something I have thought about for a long time. It is not just in Norway or Australia or Canada that the Welfare State infantilises people; for in breaking down settled communities, replacing endogenous social resources - people looking after themselves - with the interventions of institutions, welfare colonialism also operates across Britain, Europe and America. It is the paradox of trying to do good to other people. We take away their autonomy, weaken agency, and trash the gossamer ties that bind them together; so that the mores, customs, activities, and the relations they’ve created, which produce their own dense web of obligation and responsibility, are lost. A kind official tries to remove a priceless necklace from a patient’s neck. Alas her fingers are clumsy: ‘I’m so sorry. But it’s only string and beads; I’ll get you another one.…’40

A cheap piece of plastic can be the most important thing in a person’s life.

Regular contact breeds goodwill and restraint, especially where resources are scarce. Such conditions produce an alternative economy, which based on the gift and mutual aid, has its own moral code. Of course, following Mauss and Malinowski, I know that the gift can be more binding, more coercive, than a contract; for it engenders a spirit of obligation, with its attendants pride and honour, suffusing these relations with powerful feelings and superstition. Exchange not mere utility, an indifferent exercise, but a carrier of a psychic charge, electrifying a people and a place.41 Everywhere there are goblins, demons and elves…. Increase wealth - remove the poverty - and these relations will be sundered, as the fragile necessity built into such relationships is relaxed into individual volition. Prosperity and human connection. These are not so easy to combine as officials and intellectuals like think. Indeed, as Lucy Mair writes, the idea of mutual aid is apt to be seriously misunderstood by westerners if they translate this term into their own language of free choice. This one reason why the current fetish for ‘community’ and ‘participation’ often fails in practice. In traditional societies the gift and collaborative work are not voluntary acts, but a duty, almost a command.

You worked me well, Mr Thomas.
Duw, mun, all that writing
About an old nobody like me…
Exposing me, Prytherch, like that.
Jiawl! Who would have believed it, mun —
Asking all those old questions all the time,
Ordering me about, just about,
And never believing anything I said…

That day when you came down
From Moel y Llyn and asked me
(In Welsh, of course)
If I ever realised the drabness
Of my stark environment —
Whatever that meant —
And the meaning of my life…
And you a vicar, too.

Well, now Mr Thomas, I’ve never
Really given it much thought, you see —
I mean there’s the farm to look after, 
The milking, and the sheep to tend,
And one doesn’t get much time
For other things. But I’ve fine company,
You know: Sian’s a good dog,
A good friend.

You did push me a bit hard at times,
Mr Thomas, and tired me with talk,
But I don’t really gob much, you know,
And I didn’t care much for you saying
Of my ‘half-witted grin’.
I’m not dull. I go to the eisteddfodau
And I know all about englynion —
And what more do I need than that?

You’re in your world and I’m in mine.
I don’t go to church, you see —
Chapel’s good enough for me!
(And you making the village
Work to your words…)
I mean, who are you to talk?
Up there, high and mighty in your vicarage,
Playing the lord in Eglwys Fach.

42 What do working people want? A job, good plumbing, central heating, lots to eat and drink; add car, add holiday, the telly, and now the Internet. These to do the business, if the family remains intact. Yet since the 1950s there has been efforts by the welfare establishment to smash up that last bastion of working class security: teacher or the expert knows best. Intervene! Intervene! even when intervention might produce the worst outcome…. Alas, progressives are natural bureaucrats. And they have created a new class, who turn citizens into clients, whom they manage, lecture and condemn (if speak against the doxa of the age).43 Such welfare colonialism exposes one of the cruxes of the age: material benefits often produce negative effects on the psyche. It is the West’s insolvable problem: how do you deal with relative affluence in a highly privileged society? The Schloss raises a hand from the floor: ‘shouldn't that be relative poverty?’ No Herr Schloss, we forget that in today’s Britain even the poor are more prosperous than the majority of a few centuries ago (never underestimate the value of running water and regular nosh). Well-being is not just economics. So much depends on relationships, which can thrive on the fringes of a society, at its poorest extremes. How to materially improve the poor (the destitute are a different category) without removing the emotional and psychic benefits of a low paid life? This question, with its careful balancing of different qualities, is rarely asked by officials, who tend towards the obvious and the routine, as well as the self-interested and remunerative.44

Moss covered paths between scarlet peonies,
Pale jade mountains fill your rustic windows.
I envy you, drunk with flowers,
Butterflies swirling in your dreams.

45 Time to ask this terrible question: what if poverty is a good? I am making, of course, a distinction between a poor life and one of mere survival. Though this distinction is apt to be unheard in the explosion that follows my question mark. The clerks rioting out of the Benefits Office…the Schloss runs for cover; where he finds Karl Marx, Grace Hartigan, and a bunch of middle class bohemians scribbling away in a squat. ‘Got anything to eat?’ asks Karl. ’There’s some Jaffa cakes in the grate.’ He walks over to the paper-filled fireplace. ‘Herr cretin! Chocolate biscuits to bookmark my Das Kapital!’46

Let me return to a word I have used a few times in this piece. When young and fresh with socialist faith I would return home to South Wales. I’d preached The Truth to my mother as she cooked the dinner. ‘On the side of the do-gooders now, are you?’ A killing line. With a wealth of meaning, in which I, full of Left prejudice, could only read its ‘reactionary’ riches; its refusal of the radical, of the universal, of progress. What I missed was something very important indeed. Do-gooders threatened the independence of my mother; such a quality crucial for those at the bottom of a society. When you have little, what you need more than anything else is self-respect; one has to feel independent, feel in control of a life. Too many on the Left, I have found to my horror, are not interested in this quality, and the freedom it requires and gives. Far too many want to tell others what to do, say, think, be. Ych a fi, as my mother might say. She is right. For what I hadn’t grasped in my gaucherie was that mam was experiencing progressivism at the coalface; when she visited the Council, the Social, a doctor’s surgery, a hospital waiting room. She had to live with the condescension of the official, which can often take extreme forms, due to the asymmetric relationship of an institutional situation. There is almost a direct line from do-gooding to officialdom; which too often turns one into an object of bureaucratic compassion.47 It is a doll’s house tyranny. Treated as children, we are guided into the nursery, where our will is quietly removed. Although since working in these institutions I have discovered that the same infantilisation takes place inside the building.

Soul-killers. It is not just the welfare establishment. I’ve seen it in corporations too.48 Bureaucracy is the villain here.49

My brother is assuredly…as convinced as I am that the advance of bureaucratic mechanisation is irresistible. Indeed, there is nothing in the world, no machinery in the world, which works with such precision as these human machines do - nor so cheaply either!… The technical superiority of the bureaucratic mechanism is unassailable, as is the technical superiority of human-operated machinery over handicraft…. We are happy to acknowledge that there are honourable and talented people at the top of our civil service… And even though the idea that some day the world might be full of nothing but professors is frightening… the idea that the world would be filled with nothing but those little cogs is even more frightening, that is, with people who cling to a small position and strive for a bigger one… This passion for bureaucratisation…is enough to make a man despair! It is as though in politics a charwoman, with whose mental horizon a German can get along best anyway, were permitted to run things all by herself, as if we intentionally were to become people who need order and nothing but order, who get nervous and cowardly when his order becomes shaky for a moment, who become helpless when they are torn out of their exclusive adjustment to this order.50

Can the outside really sympathise with the inside?51 Robert Paine considers the idea of the Fourth World: those cultures - like the Saami - who exist on the edge of their societies. Within the Saami there are many who don’t believe in the movement; they want to be Norwegians, not a fringe group, with its stigma of eccentricity. So already there is a problem of identity. Which is further complicated, as we have seen, when that identity is used instrumentally, for then it takes on the character of the mainstream institutions. The problems increase when we enter the tribe, and find that the collective identity breaks down into a range of character types and beliefs.52 Who do you choose? This is why advocacy from the outside, even by anthropologist who has become part-native, is hazardous. Hard enough to comprehend an alien culture but to represent it…so much of the feeling Robert cannot share, even when he is close to individuals. Then that tendency to side with a representative idea - it is the bias of knowledge - rather than float on the different currents of feeling and opinion; toe-testing each shallow and deep. Even the most sophisticated will make things too simple; it is why professors should never run things…! And let’s not forget this: at the crucial moment, when you have to make a decision, you are not representing the society but a faction: how far did the town Saami agree with Robert’s stance on the dam? There is never just one answer to a social question.

Robert knows this. It is why he didn't want to play the advocate. He was cajoled. It was done under duress…. Ah! Robert holds his head: ‘I wish they hadn’t been asked me to adjudicate on that appointment’. A warning for those who want to change the world rather than understand it. Indeed, if too keen, it suggests you're the wrong person for the job; this activism less about others than one’s own psychological needs. Robert is super-smart and in tune with those he represents. He knows that any decision by an outsider is likely to go against the feelings of some Saami, who want both justice and for you to be on their side. Impossible! unless on the inside, where the idea of justice is intimate with feeling; so any action, unless very odd or traitorous, confirms the community’s beliefs not contests them.53 Our man, aware of the problem, keeps his nose close to the ground, tracking every hoof print.… Yet one more advantage of aristocrat and adventurer: he is alive to the feel of an experience, its constant flux and flow. This chap not in some bibliographical graveyard digging up dead concepts.

A wonderful interview, which ends with a quick gallery tour of the greats: EP, Franz Steiner, Dumont, Srivinas…. I leave exhausted with delight. What a show! Already I’m buying a return ticket.

Interview: Robert Paine