An Interview with Marilyn Strathern: Kinship and Career

JC: First of all, Marilyn, could you say something about how you got interested in anthropology in the first place.

MS: Well, I think it was a combination of both what was going on at school and what I was doing in my spare time at home as a teenager. I grew up in south-east England, north-west Kent, in a valley system that the Romans had in fact occupied, which meant that virtually in everyone’s backyard were Roman remains. And I, through the local Historical and Natural History Society, at about the age of 13 I think, had the opportunity to go digging, and this actually became a weekend occupation right until I was about 18 or 19 – in fact, my first vacation [at university] I spent digging in Jersey with [Charles] McBurney. ¹ But while I absolutely and thoroughly enjoyed excavating, and picked up quite a bit of knowledge, as one does at that age, I knew I didn’t want to be an archaeologist. I’m afraid I was a very serious and pompous person; in fact my mother said that I hardly smiled in my teen years, so I think that things have improved. And I think that I had, as many people did then, rather grand ideas about studying – well, it was then called mankind, society and the world very generally – and when I heard about anthropology and what the scope of anthropology was, this I am afraid fitted my rather ‘superior’ ideas. Now, although like most people I’d heard of Frazer, in fact it was because at school we were doing the 18th century, and that included thinking about Rousseau, that is, being in the company of people who were also talking about grand ideas about society; and I suppose it was that that encouraged those interests. The two came together, obviously, in the combined possibility of doing archaeology and anthropology in Cambridge, and I came up with the idea that I would pursue archaeology in the first year and continue in just anthropology.

JC: Lots of anthropologists describe some sort of dislocation in their backgrounds, either their own backgrounds or their parents’, which they would connect to their interest in anthropology. You always seem to me kind of quite quintessentially English, and unusual in that respect, to many anthropologists. Would you say that there is anything in your background that connects with the fact you took up anthropology?

MS: Well, both my parents were quite radical and independent thinkers. My mother travelled widely before the war, we had Left Book Club books in the house … I was exposed to the range of political possibilities about and in societies through her. My father under other circumstances might have been in university, but instead cultivated an extraordinary range of skills – from poetry to Darwinian theory to breeding moths for genetic reasons. And there was both a liberalism and a breadth to the kind of ideas that I was exposed to. I mean I grew up in a house full of books, and you know, needed, so to speak, no encouragement. But, where the uprootedness comes, I think, is in how I needed to create a track of my own, and I think that the archaeology was just that – doing something that was my own distinctively …

JC: You were a graduate student in Cambridge. Did you have a sense of being isolated, as a woman, and being surrounded by such great male figures of anthropology, or was that …

MS: Not at all, despite the fact that my mother was a sort of pre-feminist feminist, that is, in the 1950s she was giving WEA [Workers Educational Association] classes on women in society, women in art, and so forth, or perhaps because of it, I had this taken-for-granted mode of not thinking there was anything particularly special about being a woman. It wasn’t really until the feminist debate got off the ground in the late ’60s/early ’70s, when as you know I was castigated for gender blindness, that I began thinking these things through. I really took it for granted, and I think again that my home background assisted, that there was nothing particular about being a woman.

JC: I can understand that … As a graduate student, do you now see particular people as having had a special interest, or at the time did you feel you were particularly influenced by particular people?

MS: I was very influenced by the debate that was then active between Meyer Fortes and Edmund Leach. ² This was in the early ’60s, and each of them would be lecturing. There were two lecture rooms – the north lecture room and the south lecture room – my memory now makes a narrative out of that, as though one were lecturing in one and one in the other … and we students went from north to south [rooms], but of course that was not quite how the timetables were arranged. Nonetheless, one was in a department where one felt that there were active issues being debated and that was very stimulating. I think I learned a tremendous amount from Meyer Fortes, but, and perhaps there’s a lesson there, because he was head of the department, I suppose I somehow regarded him as orthodox, although he was in fact … looking back, I think that there was a tremendous originality to what he was doing; nevertheless, you know what students are … I think in that context I thought of Edmund as heterodox and in that sense attractive; but there’s no doubt that Edmund, who was at that point introducing British anthropology to structuralism and The Elementary Structures of Kinship [Lévi-Strauss, 1969 (1949)] … had things to say that appeared fresh and novel, and he ran a seminar on Malinowski, a seminar that lasted the entire term, which was a tremendous learning experience, going over a single person’s work again and again, and that really made a distinct impression. My supervisors were Esther Goody ³ and Audrey Richards. ⁴

Esther inspired me, from the point of view of teaching me attention to detail on the one hand, and on the other hand impressed on me a sense of work – that writing and composing and analysing and commenting and teaching are, so to speak, jobs that have to be done, that these things don’t just flow, and I think I have always been grateful for that. She was also my PhD supervisor, and Paula Brown ⁵ was a sort of overseas consultant and fieldwork advisor …

JC: I wanted to go on to ask you a little bit about fieldwork and perhaps start with the obvious question, to which most people do not have a very interesting answer, but perhaps you are the exception: what made you choose to do fieldwork in New Guinea?

MS: Well, New Guinea, I suppose because it wasn’t Africa … And the highlands of New Guinea were at that point being opened up to fieldworkers, and their very first ethnographies – Salisbury and Marie Reay’s work ⁶ – were being published, and this seemed a new fresh place.

JC: Did you actually enjoy fieldwork, at least broadly speaking?

MS: Well, I returned last year (1995) for a couple of months, both with a small project to do and also to see people again, and enjoyed that unequivocally and emphatically, but I think that is part of growing older also – that is, I think I enjoy more things about living in general at my age now than when I was 24 or 25. I thought at the time I was enjoying fieldwork and I think I did: I like being out of doors, I rather like all the practical side of it, which links up with my liking archaeology, which of course also took one out of doors, and also has a kind of practical component. I enjoyed … No, I was going to say I enjoyed finding out things and so forth, but actually that’s post-fieldwork.

JC: Indeed.

MS: I wouldn’t not have done fieldwork for anything. I feel really privileged to have been in a situation where it was actually my job to find out other people’s ideas and values, modes of relating and so forth, in a way that presented me also with an intellectual set of issues to tease out, because I found in the interim since first doing fieldwork, you know right up to now, that whenever I return to my New Guinea material, I get a … it’s a sort of almost breeze, it’s the kind of exhilaration that arrives from engaging with it – even though of course I know that it’s self-created to a large extent – even though it’s all filtered through anthropological models and so forth, the point is that behind it … does lie other people’s engagement with their own social circumstances that one is being asked to reflect on, and I just find that combination quite enthralling. It really does give me some lift – working with that material. At the time, of course, because one was really there, and because one was really involved, interactions had all the stress and tension that, as it were, incomplete transactions do. I mean, I think one of the reasons why going back to the material is rewarding is … because it is in a sense – I don’t mean not complete, but not part of relationships that are necessarily ongoing, and I say that because the nature of transactions with people there can’t be collapsed into any simple recollection: it was wonderful company or an irritating set of demands. Relationships were constantly being negotiated, and became at times, you know, tense, and I was at times, you know, unhappy, depressed and all the rest, all the emotions that accompany any sort of interaction. But the short answer is … Yes! One would be a fool not to.

JC: Marilyn, I’ve been asked to interview you about kinship, and the first, sort of obvious, question: would you describe your work as being basically about kinship or do you see it quite differently?

MS: I don’t think I would mind being described like that because I do think that I held on to issues to do with kinship through the years when it really wasn’t prominent on the anthropological agenda; but you have to realize that coming out of the Cambridge department in the 1960s meant that studying kinship was a way to study society, and that in looking at kinship relations one was also looking at political and economic life, religion, and so forth, and this was very much how it was taught. So, one took it for granted that kinship was a means to understanding social configurations in general. Now, as you know, I’ve rather mischievously extended that from the kinds of societies to which it was thought to principally apply, namely the kinds of horticulturalist and pastoralist, largely non-state societies, to wondering whether kinship in fact might not also be a route to thinking about, in aspects of … well, if I refer to the cultural configuration as English, you’ll know what I mean, but like everyone else, I have tremendous problems with specifying the cultural area, though usually I sort of gloss it as Euro-American. I think it’s important to use a gloss in order to be reminded of the distinctiveness of the materials one’s dealing with, and of course no single gloss serves.

Anyway, After Nature [1992], as you know, was asking questions about late 20th-century society through taking up kinship, mischievously, because of course, the assumptions are that kinship in western – after Talcott Parsons – that kinship in western societies occupies a place that is … that might be central to people’s personal lives, but by that very same token is marginal to broader social concerns. In doing so, of course, I had to define kinship rather liberally, as to do with a set of issues about the formation of relationships against a background of a primal distinction between biological process on one hand and social constructs on the other. Anyway … it was an exercise; it was also an exercise intended as a … well, it was written at the height of Thatcherism, and it was intended as a critique that did not so to speak absolve the critic. In other words, my question was: ‘How have we produced a Prime Minister who says that there is no such thing as society?’, and the answer has to include that we’ve all conspired to produce this figure. It therefore should follow, and if one’s theories of culture are correct it should follow, that wherever one looks, so to speak, in English society, one would find echoes of the presumptions and values that sustained a figure like that. And I took kinship as an unlikely domain, but nonetheless was able out of those materials to produce a description that showed how, when people went around with these kinds of ideas in their heads about how people are related to one another, they could also countenance that kind of Prime Minister.

JC: One of your reviewers, now … I think as far as I remember, I think it was in the Guardian … described the outlook of After Nature as being bleak, or lugubrious, or…

MS: Melancholic.

JC:  … melancholic, was it? Well, it obviously stuck. Would you like to comment on that? Why, I mean…

MS: Yes, there are two very different reasons, I suppose. One is that it was a critique written from a rather depressed point of view, because it did seem to me that the kind of values that were being promulgated in the mid-1980s weren’t actually going to go away, whatever government was following, that we were in the midst of a cultural revolution, and … what were being turned around were actually notions about public good and civil society that were the notions that had made possible the expansion of the universities in the ’60s and so forth, that had supported the kinds of enquiries that anthropology in turn was making about the nature of public life in other contexts, and so forth. These presumptions may have been being upturned for good purposes, but I do sometimes think that whatever advantages or gains come from revolutions, they are always uncertain, whereas the traumas and difficulties [which they bring] for people are always certain. I don’t think of it [my standpoint] as just nostalgia. Though of course the book is also about nostalgia, and I wouldn’t exclude myself, but it was a commentary on not just the fate, so to speak, of a particular kind of society, but also the ways of conceptualizing society that it [the revolution] had given rise to.

It’s terribly unfashionable, of course, to be nostalgic, precisely because nostalgia gets criticized on all grounds, criticized on all sides for sentimentalism, romanticism, and so forth, and … I even get that amazingly in relation to The Gender of the Gift [1988] … but what an emotional reaction such as nostalgia does is sharpen one’s critical faculties in certain directions, and I think all I was doing was just commenting on some of the wider, well, it seemed to me, intellectual changes that were also in train. I realize that this is an odd way to put things, because I’m sure most people would prefer to have a sort of positive and expansive and enlarging view of their discipline or their circumstances, or whatever. But I just wanted to add something about the second point I was going to make … You know, everyone has different abilities – some people are optimists and some people are pessimists, and optimists are able to use their optimism and harness it. Well, pessimists are also able to use their pessimism and harness it; and I would count myself as a professional pessimist. Which actually, I find a … really, well sort of … productive and creative position to be in.…

JC: OK, What about the intellectual influences in your work on kinship? I suppose Schneider’s ⁷ is the obvious one, but…

MS: Yes … Well, perhaps I should say a bit about that. Coming back to Britain after having spent time in Papua New Guinea and in particular becoming involved with Audrey Richards and the Elmdon project, ⁸ I thought there was a role for anthropology in commenting on cultural issues in kinship, in a field that was otherwise really very much akin to the sociology of kinship, and of course specifically, the sociology of the family. That was the time, in the late ’70s, in which American cultural anthropology was beginning to make its influence felt. And I suppose that I was part of this, in discovering in David Schneider attention to some of the fundamental issues to do with nature and culture, that [here] seemed to be an approach to cultural issues in kinship. These things have their cycles, and I’m not saying that this is now my present position, but at the time David Schneider’s work seemed to be a breath of fresh air, and certainly it was influential.

JC: OK. In the early ’80s it looked very much to some people, I think, as though kinship was dead, or moribund, as a subject, and that hardly seems the case now. What do you think contributed to the revitalization of the study of kinship in anthropology?

MS: Well, possibly there are two rather different routes, and two different answers. One is the route that I see your own work, for example, taking, which stems out of an interest in personhood, which itself was produced by, one might almost say, a kind of exhaustion of the possibilities of exploring institutions as dominated the 1960s, which was different from the Marxist anthropology of the 1970s, which was akin to a number of the issues that were raised by feminist scholars, but also independent of them. … And the concept of the person appeared to present a key to describing the connections between relationships on the one hand, and values and ideas on the other, which was almost tantamount to the same configuration that the notion of society itself offered. I see the person as an extremely powerful heuristic for drawing together many of the elements anthropologists otherwise distributed in different ways. And given the nature of the materials that anthropologists are dealing with, I think their own relation to it is an excellent case in point: there is no way in which one can come to grips with ideas about the person that don’t take [into account] the formation of the person, in terms of procreation and reproduction, and the network of relations within which persons find themselves, [in short,] … no way one could discount kinship. The point is that [it was] unlike, for example, the place of kinship in Marxist anthropology, where it becomes caught up in debates about infrastructure and superstructure and so forth, so that kinship itself doesn’t offer a fresh analytic approach – it merely is, so to speak, a domain of relations that tends to be encompassed by the model. Whereas what the notion of person did is force the reconceptualization of what we might mean by kinship, so that it fed back into the existing assumptions about kinship, provided a new focus of critique … And that’s my [first] answer.

The second answer is: that while the family has always been in crisis in Euro-American culture, I mean it’s part of its definition, just as communities and villages are always disappearing … there have been some interesting new crises to do with the advent of the new technologies and assisted conception, that have, to my mind, revealed kinship as a subject of study as distinct from the institution, as distinct from the family. In kinship, one is talking about the formation of intimate relationships, one isn’t talking about institutional or social forms or groupings or units as such. Here I get a bit solipsistic, because … it’s not the case necessarily that anthropology would have fallen on this area of debate if there hadn’t been one or two anthropologists who saw the potential, perhaps, for applying notions of kinship to it. I’ve often said that what we’re seeing, in the popular debates that surround many of the circumstances in which people find themselves put in the context of the new reproductive technologies, is a culture commenting on itself, because what it brought into view was all sorts of pre-existing suppositions and values. And indeed what is brought into view is the very basis of the way in which the procreative process is described, so that the categories available to people for describing their relations in talking about what makes up a child and how they are connected to it, or to a child, is very literally being analysed, that is, taken apart piece by piece and put together in a variety of new combinations. I think it’s a tremendous opportunity, for anthropology, to witness new cultural forms in the making, in the very area which it also made its own – namely, kinship.

JC: Do you think anthropology has a particular contribution to make to the debates about new reproductive technologies, and how would you see that contribution?

MS: Well, there are several answers one could give to the question about anthropology’s contribution. The first is of course that the debate doesn’t exist ‘out there’ [as an abstract reference point], it only exists where these issues are being debated, and I think for anthropology to bring the debate home, so to speak, and make it an object of intellectual exercise in terms of understanding processes of cultural change is itself of value. But that of course is of value to anthropology. The debate’s carried on in a variety of contexts and with a variety of suppositions. There is certainly a role for anthropology here to carry on conveying one of the fundamental messages it is able to formulate, namely the diversity of the arrangements under which people do anything, and that goes for this area as for any other. And in fact Peter Rivière’s very early article in Anthropology Today [1985] is about this context of the [Warnock] report ⁹ that had just been published. What he detected was a degree of anxiety and … well, not so strong as hysteria, but … he addressed the degree of concern with which people were contemplating the new arrangements, pointing out that the ethnographic record yielded many examples of diverse ways in which people reproduced themselves through children, and regenerated themselves. But you can detect a hesitation in my voice at saying that is anthropology’s principal contribution, because I think in a way it is almost too easily wheeled on. And I say this in the context where it is a political stance; that is, where one is already occupying an interested position in these debates in saying that human cultures are infinitely diverse and there is no problem in contemplating, as it were, the most bizarre kinds of arrangements, because this is one of the political positions [it is possible to adopt], and the political position is that of choice: the position is one, basically, of deregulation, that this [NRTs] is an area where people should be allowed to exercise their choices. And of course, on a one-to-one basis, in actually thinking about individuals and the particular lives they follow, it’s a very powerful argument. Indeed the issues of how one would even wish to introduce regulations in these areas are themselves extremely problematic. But the fact that things are problematic is not in itself reason for not trying to deal with them, or think them through, and I would actually see the anthropologist’s role in this instance as, not one of [reiterating a notion of] ‘infinite human diversity’, but rather pointing out the ramifications and consequences of what seem to be individual decisions but that in fact do have repercussions.

Now, again, I’m not saying that these repercussions and so forth are not to be welcomed, or, I’m not saying that one shouldn’t welcome the directions in which societies are changing and so forth, but it does happen to be the case that people’s actions have consequences not only on those … with whom they are in immediate contact. They [also] have what one might say are counter-consequences, that is, they raise possibilities, and those ideas then become part of the repertoire with which everyone thinks. It is impossible now to think about issues of procreation without bearing in mind that it’s always possible to resort to assisted conception and other kinds of means; which in many, many cases may, of course, be beneficial, but in other cases, as we know, puts tremendous pressure on people who feel that they somehow owe it to themselves to pursue [all possible] means. One of the things that intrigues me is how living in a culture that so values choice and regards technology as enabling, that with justification looks on the way it can improve circumstances for individuals, nevertheless makes other things impossible. The whole debate, for example, about anonymity in assisted conception arrangements is pre-empted by the contemporary value put on openness that takes away the opportunity for ignorance. Now, that sounds odd in a sense, but it’s because we have for so long lived with a situation in which it was lack of choice that constrained people and where, as is still of course true in many areas, ignorance is the problem and not knowledge. Yet we have to think rather seriously about the problems that choice brings and the problems that knowledge also brings; and it is from this perspective that an anthropologist can comment on arrangements in other societies, where people have rather careful procedures, and in fact very often procedures for concealing things from themselves. And we might look rather closely at these and not simply assume that openness is desirable.

JC: How do you see the future of kinship studies, if you do see it?

MS: Well, I was going to say … ask … any questions, except any questions about the future.

JC: All right…

MS: I’m quite hopeless about the future.

JC: That’s a pessimistic answer?…

MS: But, I could actually say something about knowledge that follows on from what I just said about openness.

JC: Um-hmm…

MS: Which is that I see the same issue in fact facing us as knowledge consumers and producers in academia, that we have – and necessarily so, I’m not denigrating it – ridden on the crest of the knowledge wave, so to speak, the notion that you improve what you know by finding out, by adding to what you already know, finding out more, and we have developed technologies in fact for producing and reproducing and storing knowledge. I think that the issue of how one reduces the amount of information that is available is also a rather sort of teasing and perplexing intellectual problem. We all get a bit of it in the context of teaching and what we do with students, but I think there is actually a much wider issue here: what one does with the possibilities of ever-increasing information to which one has access, when all we seem to be doing is enhancing our means of access.

JC: That connects to what you’ve written about kinship in another way … the endless possibilities of bilateral kinship, [the problem of] how you get a cut-off point.

MS: Oh crikey, Janet.

JC: So, the next lot of questions were really about feminism, and I think you would always describe yourself as a feminist, but what kind of feminist do you see yourself as?

MS: I am seen as an academic, rather than activist, feminist. And that means, in the university context, that my concern is to reiterate the contributions that feminist scholarship has made in thinking about debates, especially in anthropology of course, but insisting very strongly, and it still needs to be insisted, that these are contributions to the intellectual project. But not as an activist, in the sense that I don’t in fact have a particularly well thought out [political] position that would translate into university dealings, except in a sort of modest way: while in the context of making appointments and the conduct of meetings and so forth, just being aware of gender issues. But, as I think you know … I am sensitive, but I am not terribly sensitive. It took me ages to appreciate the position [that women academics often have to occupy]. I think I’ve been protected as well…

JC: What intellectual influences are there behind your feminism?

MS: The biggest intellectual influence in fact was my own mother … I referred earlier to the adult education classes she was taking in the 1950s, which made me take for granted the fact that dealing with the affairs of women was unexceptional and respectable, and in fact that made me rather slow to get into the debates which all arose, of course, from people not taking it for granted. The rapid education I had in that was supplied by Annette Weiner, ¹⁰ and I … remain forever grateful to her … partly because she took me to task on ethnographic grounds, in other words the first fight was in relation to the interpretation of anthropological materials. And I think it was this that led me to see the tremendous importance of being clear about the [intellectual-political] position one was occupying, and the long-term benefit of that was my being able to ‘use’ feminism as a point of view or position. That is, especially in The Gender of the Gift, it has the role of constantly reminding me, as author, that apart from just being an anthropologist and critic and analysing this material, I also occupy a position that has a counter-point in the rest of the world that I inhabit. … [I]t serves as a reminder that one is bound to be taking a position in relation to one’s work that one may not be aware of – it makes one aware of that position.

JC: Which sort of brings me to the next question, which is that you are of course also a great deconstructor of not only feminism but feminism partly, and I wonder if that brings you into kind of conflict of loyalty there, between your allegiance of feminism and your propulsion to analyse it at the same time?

MS: Well, I think that if I were an optimist, yes, because I would have to align myself with things that I saw as unproblematic, whereas one of the things I think being a pessimist does is enable one to be critical and analytical of the circumstances one is in, without despairing, completely, because despair isn’t a threat. One is living through and using despair constructively, so that, in fact, I would say that I criticize/analyse what I love or adhere to. I like being English, I appreciate being part of and a contributor to feminist scholarship, and it’s on the basis of what I [positively] value that I, well, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that there is an obligation to be critical towards what one values, but there is absolutely no conflict between being critical and valuing something. You will see that is in fact my strategy in writing After Nature: being critical and not [positively] valuing Margaret Thatcher meant that I had to actually go out and seek my source of critique in something that I do value. There’s a lot of myself written into that book and a lot of things that I am familiar with and have tremendous affection for, but I had to be critical of what I liked, because that gave me a purchase in articulating what I didn’t like about the current regime. I couldn’t have addressed Thatcherite politics directly and criticized [them] because that would simply detract [rehearse the same issues].

JC: My own mother used to say rather succinctly ‘pessimists are always right’.

MS: I’m glad we had that bit of the conversation, that actually puts my … I hadn’t thought about it before, but that puts pessimism in a productive light.

JC: I wanted to ask you about something that may or may not be a somewhat painful subject, which is the subject of writing, that is painful to many of us; I wanted to ask you whether, well it’s obvious that many people, including students, find reading your work quite demanding and difficult. I wondered if you could say anything about your writing style… to help them along, or…?

MS: Well, the first thing to everyone out there is ‘I’m sorry!’ I hope that the difficulty is not being obscure in order to confuse, for it’s not something I have [complete] control over. I am aware that it is problematic and I’m aware that some pieces are more problematic than others. At the same time, everything I do at the time seems to be an incredible simplification and reduction, and though the outcome is complex, I never strive for complexity. I’m always striving for clarity. If I were to put a kind interpretation on it, it would be that the basic materials with which we deal are complex and the practice of anthropological narrative, which is to constantly show the relations between relations, is a complexifying process. And, from one point of view, I make no apologies at all for any of us being complex. In fact there are too many people happy to go around simplifying things, and I think that introducing at times the modicum of complexity in one’s writing pales beside the real complexities existing in any social situation, and if all anthropology is doing is just pointing out that something a little bit more complex than was thought first of all, that seems to me an excellent thing to do. And, from that point of view, I apologize not at all for complexity. What I apologize for, I think, is putting a burden [on the reader]. In other words, one ought to be able to make that complexity reveal itself. So, what I have to apologize for is the burden that is put on the reader who finds it difficult. I can add two comments, and they’re related. One is that no reader ever gets from a work what the writer intends, because in assimilating work they are taking it in and they reproduce it. It’s not a case of replication, it is reproduction, that is, a re-working of materials, and in that sense I prefer the kind of presentation of ideas that does not tell you what he or she has to get from them. I suppose that if the stuff appears to be a bit complex, it is because I haven’t insisted on the ultimate clarifying lines, because that is not me … it would be me if I were capable of writing clarifying lines! [So] I have to think of something else. I enjoy the fact that people seem to get very diverse things out of my work … and I would hope that because there’s no one line to follow that actually frees people to take what they will out of it.

The second point is related to that, which is simply that there have been several occasions where people have said to me, you know, ‘Your work is impossible, it’s far too complex, I can’t follow it, but isn’t it interesting!’ And, I suppose that I get some comfort from the fact that there’s enough there for somebody to get out of it something of their own. … A third point, now I come to think of it, is that apart from the division of labour that there has to be between scholars – I’m not denigrating, how could I, people who write with tremendous clarity, I mean there’s absolutely a place for them – there’s a place for other kinds of people as well. I think there’s room for different versions of scholarship, in the same way as in teaching. While there’s definitely a place for producing material that’s instantly assimilatable, I think there’s actually a very strong case for [also] producing material that isn’t instantly assimilatable. Now in the case of readers, I’m sorry for the burden the work puts on them, but in the case of students, I would actually turn that around and say that one of one’s jobs is actually to introduce students to a degree of complexity that can’t be assimilated unless they work on it. In other words, it is the work they do on what they’re given which is their learning process. It would be absolutely hopeless if everything that students did were like that, there has to be a degree of assimilability, I’m not saying that’s not important, but I’m saying that there is also a role for presenting stuff which simply can’t be consumed unless it is worked on, and working on it takes time. And, it may well be that it is not until, say, the end of a lecture course of several weeks that students may finally realize what was going on at the beginning.

JC: Sometimes several years. And [then if one] comes back to it … I can’t think why it was ever so difficult … it’s very interesting. I think your work has that effect, you read it once and think ‘I can’t understand this’, and then some years later you think, ‘Why was it so difficult?’ … 

I find that when I think about you in Edinburgh … I quite often do … I very often think of you in your garden in Manchester, although I probably didn’t see you in your garden in Manchester that often, compared to those corridors in the Roscoe Building. What about the role of your garden?

MS: Well, I often look back with some amusement at how totally uninterested I was in gardening as a child, or even I suppose as a young adult. I think gardening has taken its [place]. Of course in … Port Morseby gardening was impossible, so I have only had a garden since coming back to England in 1976, but I think in the context of running a household, and also doing academic work, the garden is neither. So, if one looks at oneself at all, as it were between the work and the house, somehow the garden is an escape from both. I do like being outside, and do like getting my hands dirty: I don’t wear gloves. I like seeing things grow. I weed rather than dig, it satisfies my liking to have things orderly. That is, a lot of my gardening, I’m afraid, is imposing order … I don’t plant from seed, and I very rarely buy in plants. What I am in fact doing is weeding, cutting, trimming, pulling out weeds so that [other] plants can grow, delighting in plants … Oh, and pruning them … In other words, I suspect a lot of the organization that is necessary in other parts of life, but shouldn’t be too intrusive, in the garden actually becomes aesthetic. … That one can clean up bits. But of course the pleasure of the garden is that, providing one has a modicum of skill, and I only have a modicum, I’d never refer to myself as a gardener, that the garden doesn’t mind. It bounces back, in fact it looks rather nice when you’ve been in the garden, and provided one doesn’t make a complete botch of it, [one knows] it will grow. Which I think is more than anyone could look for in life [at large] … It is not under control. Gardening is attention and organization and ordering, yet what one is ordering, what one is doing, one isn’t changing beyond repair. On the contrary, the stuff beams back at one, grows back at one. And I can’t think of any other realm in which that occurs.…

JC: Well, there you are … I got you to give an optimistic answer if ever there was one.