I suppose I learned a bit about sociological
determinism there, and the way in which the
construction of societies seeped into people's
thoughts, and bones, even, and accounted for
some of these extraordinary variations across
the world.
And that was a very exciting discovery, because
it made one come back to thinking about how
Wartime Britain had created a different society,
for example, or how post War Britain was evolving.
And that set a train of thought which has
stayed with me forever.
And the anthropological method was so important.
That idea that you didn't do things in an
aloof way, you didn't sort of send out teams
of juniors to collect your data, and you sat
at home in comfortable situations and looked
through your ... your microscope and wrote
your reports, but you actually lived, you
engaged with that society.
There was a sense of you not being able to
write anything decent about the societies
you were trying to describe and understand,
unless you at least spent part of the time
there, and better, lived among them.
And I think the idea that some anthropologists
went and lived for several years, in very
uncomfortable circumstances, sometimes in
very dangerous conditions, and tried to understand
the society as a whole, because they couldn't
explain any detail within it, without understanding
the whole.
That was, that was a lesson that has lived
with me all my life.
