 Good morning Ed. How are you doing? I'm doing all right thanks. As I explained briefly to you I'm conducting a short research project to understand how trends in the discipline of anthropology take shape. Is it to do with funding bodies, how funding bodies interact with personality, with political issues going on in the world, with events, chants. So if I could take a few minutes of your time and first of all if you could maybe tell me how you became an anthropologist in the first place. What made you decide was it something you had already in mind or something that happened? I think like many people the story of why I became an anthropologist works at different sorts of levels, my background, what sort of things I was interested in when I was younger, but also serendipity and chance of played roles too. In my own case quite simply when I was younger I went traveling by accident to South Asia. I'd not really intended to do this at all and I realized that because I'd gone by accident I didn't know anything about the land I was passing through what I was seeing and I spent a lot of time just thinking about the people I met along the road and when I got back to Europe a year later I was really curious I just wanted to know more I wanted to learn about where I'd been and what I'd seen because I'd not had an opportunity to read about it in advance or really to think about where I was going to go in advance and that took me to study anthropology at the University of Manchester at the time. So I really stumbled into it because I'd been on holiday by chance and then after I'd finished my first degree I went back to India again to think about the things I've been studying but to think about it in the context of being in India and on that occasion I went by not by chance by design this time to work on a particular development project in eastern Gujarat a site called the Namada Dam where at the time large numbers of people were being resettled because of the rising waters and the infrastructure development that was happening around it and I became very curious about Gujarat because which year again was this? That must have been 1995. Can I interrupt one second and bring it back? So did you even know what anthropology was? Obviously you must have known what anthropology was to go back to Manchester and decide. I remember that when I started I decided to study anthropology I didn't even know what anthropology was and I was somehow entrusted in that direction from some teacher. When we interview undergraduates we don't anymore but when we did interview undergraduates or when we read undergraduates personal statements when they're applying for admissions we do look for evidence of whether they know what anthropology is or not by what kind of books they've read or how they write about anthropology and in my case I'd had a teacher at high school who had recommended that I might be interested in studying anthropology because I was studying a level sociology so I had read a couple of books but I can remember being interviewed for places as an undergraduate student and having to discuss those books with the people who were interviewing me and one of them I remember studying discussing a book called Stone Age Economics with Peter Louis Ross at the London School of Economics and I remember studying a book on growing tobacco in your back garden with somebody called Janet Carston at the University of Manchester and I could see that they were books that they both knew and were interested in but I couldn't say that I knew anything about the theory or the history of anthropology. I knew a little bit about what anthropologists did or at least I thought I did. Sure, thank you. You can go back to where you had left at the Nomada. Yes, so I took a break from working as a volunteer on the Nomada Dambury settlement sites and I cycled again around the coast of Bajiraft thinking now about doing a PhD place and I bought myself an Indian bicycle, one gear, very heavy thing in a place called Bhavnagar and then I cycled all around the coast stopping at each and every port along the way. What time of the year was this? That was probably in the spring. It wasn't too hot at that time even back in the 90s. What did people think about you cycling? Very kind, very generous, maybe a little bit eccentric why you cycling rather than taking the bus but I traveled around the coast on my bicycle and ended up in a place in an area of Gujarat known as Kutch and came to a town called Mandvi which I instantly thought was one of the most amazing places I'd ever been to. It was old, it was very cosmopolitan, there were people from all over with stories about being all over the Indian Ocean and there was something very gentle, something very relaxed about it but also something quite sincere which I really appreciated. The fact that it also had quite a nice beach added to its attractiveness and that was where I ended up spending a couple of years doing my PhD research on shipbuilders and maritime community. So if I may ask again a couple of questions because as I said I'm interested in understanding the relationship between chance and other kinds of events, structures and so you said that first you went on holiday by accident but it was an accident that was also in a way caused by certain political situation in Africa where that was that didn't allow you to go there and then how did you end up working on the Normada resettlement project? Through friends of friends who put me in touch with somebody who led one of the resettlement organizations, someone from North India actually from a place called Muradabad so it was through somebody else's personal network that I was taken there and then it was actually I think if I remember correctly it was through somebody I knew from London who suggested that I go to Kutch and to Manvi in particular because they had family connections there. So actually my first connection with anybody in Manvi came from a connection in London so it was like that. So then you came back to London and went back to Manvi to conduct research for your PhD. Yes. Next you obviously have had a lot more experience of research. That PhD research was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council which in some ways gave me an experience of a particular sort of anthropology that it's more social science oriented perhaps and his humanities oriented which I think has had some subsequent influence on the kinds of research that I've done. So in a nutshell more recently I've been interested in what you might think of as the anthropology of big stuff, the anthropology of earthquakes, the anthropology of post-colonial history and now the anthropology of roads and infrastructure in South Asia and what took me into that in that direction was in Gujarat in 2001 there was an earthquake. When I wasn't in Gujarat at the time I was at University of Santa Barbara in California and I feel quite naturally I was concerned for the people I knew for my friends in in Kutch and that concern eventually led to a research project thinking about post-earthquake reconstruction in an anthropological mode so I was taken into earthquake research by concern for my friends not because I'd had any longer term interest in in earthquakes or in post-disaster reconstruction or the anthropology of humanitarianism how we might want to think about it. But that accident was actually the accident that catastrophe was very influential because I spent the next 10 years of my life repeatedly visiting the same field site, repeatedly asking the same questions and looking what happened to the earthquake, what happened to memories of the earthquake, the way it was described as the years went by so that was for 10 years and during the course of that one of the most dominant themes in post-earthquake reconstruction in Gujarat at that time was road construction. A lot of the effort of the state government had gone into road construction. Roots which was a very small town in the center of Kutch had three concentric ring roads built around it and the people I knew there were enchanted by these ring roads they were a sign of modernity a sign of their arrival people were going to have picnics on the roads on a Sunday evening just not when they were full of traffic but before they were full of traffic and there was something quite magical and almost enchanting about the roads and the way they entered into the lives of this small town and thinking about that and that experience of perhaps not fully understanding why slabs of tarmac were such influential symbols and themes in people's lives places of optimism and hope almost you could think I didn't understand it but obviously you yourself used or were in some way interested in road from much before you seem to have cycled all the way from Europe to to India and and I mean is there something is it something that you had somewhere in the back of your mind before or can you actually answer that question I think it's fair I think it's fair to say that in some ways I've been in interested in roads for a very long time of which perhaps the that cycling trip I mentioned across Asia was one example but before that I was interested in roads in different sorts of ways in fiction and influenced by Jack Karowak driving backwards and forwards across America and thinking about what it was like to be on the road in a particular sort of way thinking and moving and living in a moving landscape in a place in a moving place the past between different sorts of places so yes I think the interest in roads runs deep and I've also really recently discovered an interest in other kinds of infrastructure in ports and containers and things like that and I don't know where this interest comes from perhaps it stems from roads but I was in my late father's attic not very long ago and I came across a model container with cranes and containers in it all of the things that I suddenly found myself interested in 40 years later you know that's quite strange in a way but I also think that it's not only about having childhood interest in things it's about things becoming salient in the present it's about roads so many roads are being constructed in the world at the moment that it's a it's a matter of now it's a matter of thinking about anthropology as a subject that is equipped to attack to tackle and address contemporary issues that's what I wanted to bring it because you seem to have been successful with most of your projects to attract funding by the ESRC or the European Research Council how do you think that happened I mean obviously you're good at writing proposals but do you think there is some sort of synergy between sudden events like the unfortunate event of the earthquake and changes in the discipline as well or changes in interests and funding bodies I think that's a very interesting question and quite difficult to answer without giving away all of my secrets right I think I think the question is a good one in the sense that disasters and events and processes in the world that are newsworthy attractive and current have more of an emotive pull perhaps in terms of writing grant applications but I also think that grant applications can push at the edge of things move things on so for the example of the roads application which was to the European Research Council lots of people have studied roads lots of people have thought about roads roads as material things roads that connect people but not many people have thought about the thought that goes into roads so the project is about something else other than the road the road if you like is a device to think about other thoughts to think about other realms of knowledge what proceeds roads or what comes after both in a way what thought is going into the construction of so many roads what ideas are actually leading bulldozers so about sustainability about the future of the world I think this yeah I think the question of sustainability is the question about what comes after the road the question of global sustainability is of course there within the project about roads to think about why institutions with one hand to think about climate change and sustainable development orders and on the other hand are investing massively in infrastructure which has a multiplier effect that people are only just really beginning to understand and thinking 50 years into the future the consequences of current road building spree in Asia and Africa will have a tremendous effect on the ways in which the planet is organized so although roads is the artifact the way in the actual questions are slightly different what do you think of the of the role of chance in anthropology chance as a method of inquiry anthropology seems to be based a lot on the idea that you as an anthropologist you need to be open to things to things that happen so to be open to receive a knowledge that is different from yours to to understand something other in in some way and for that you need to have a certain naivety if you if you want do you think that has played a role in your own research do you I think the orthodoxy of the discipline at the moment would be to say that things like naivety serendipity chance openness were one key part of a fieldwork method which would go along with a more professionalized sense of ethics confidentiality informed consent so you have the two aspects however research that I've recently been doing with someone who looks remarkably like you actually has made me question some of these things because by we've been involved in a project where we've been re-looking at anthropology that's already been done so if you like to think about that studying the place twice but using different people to do it and of course gender ethnicity language personality and so on all of those personal variables come into play and who and what and how you can know things during fieldwork but at the same time some of the structuring structures of the local society the place have been evident to both researchers right so serendipity is serendipity is perhaps a device which exists because anthropologists typically only do research once in one place so everything is serendipitous because they don't know any of anything otherwise whereas doing the same thing twice gives a slightly different sense of what is real what is not what is serendipitous and what is accidental I think I have maybe one last question going back to the roads and sustainability and it's about how far do you think anthropologists are equipped to make predictions about the future thinking about anthropology as a discipline that responds to current events in particular ways that's also a very interesting question I think the future for academia more generally is becoming increasingly important there's a university in Holland that has just opened the department of futurology future sustainability I think big agendas like a sustainability agenda which is becoming a global agenda is forcing people to look forwards perhaps in a more clear and stronger sense than they have done in the past because this sustainability agenda is all about the future now whether anthropologists using traditional modes of field work participant observation and long residences in one particular place are well equipped to comment on the future using that traditional set of methodologies they have I'm not so certain but I do know that anthropologists are interested in things like climate change in local sustainability practices in thinking about local community organizations alternative economics alternative ways of organizing the distribution production and distribution of food and resources I think much of the work that anthropologists are doing is at the cutting edge of those sorts of agendas informed by sometimes sometimes in a radical politics sometimes by a more general sense of humanitarianism thinking about the future being everybody's future rather than just ours or theirs or theirs or ours and future but thinking about a globalized generalized future is I think beginning to drive a research agenda it's certainly driving my interest in roads which is a very future looking project absolutely and I guess I mean this intersects with the questions about politics to me at least in the sense that the future you know ideas about the future are also shaped about ideas of how you think we would like the future to be in some way and I imagine it's quite difficult to disentangle those from your research so how much do you think your own ideas or desires or projections for a future have also had an impact on the ways you chose your subjects and areas I think that if I can talk about the the roads project which is looking at the construction of infrastructure in South Asia in a more general sense there is a broader pattern of political positioning behind what I've written but at the same time I think it's important in a project like this to be agnostic about whether roads are good or bad to start with a relatively open mind as to that question to begin to explore why so many institutions individuals governments and conglomerations of interests that's the other thing it's not just one factor that's driving the construction of roads so to start with an agnostic position allows you I think to survey a broad scene and get a feel for what the main currents and trends are in thinking about these sorts of questions but at the same time being interested in relating that sort of anthropology and anthropology of institutions to a politics of sustainability is inevitably a political position but that's where I think anthropology can be interesting because anthropology can be disruptive thought it can disrupt processes and trains and it can point out that the arguments on which the construction of roads are built and is an artifice it's a form of ideology it's and intervening disruptively in that those sorts of debates I think is actually very useful for and is one of the powerful uses to which ethnographic research can be put so it's an argument in a way beyond the truth of roads themselves but it's an argument about how things are made to appear meaningful which is sometimes quite difficult to explain to non anthropologists that that is an anthropological mode of analysis yeah and I think that brings us to a whole other discussion about ethics and politics that maybe will could I ask you a question sure um what do you intend to do with the interviews you're doing as part of this project I'm intending to to probably work on a publication which will rethink some of the current methodological trends in the discipline and in particular as I said at the beginning the you know that will engage with what the role of of chance or naivety is in anthropology as a as a methodology okay thank you very much for your time and there might be a few things I will want to follow up so I might drop you an email and yeah I'll okay thank you