About

I’ve always been fascinated by how people manage, despite everything, to rub along most of the time, and to build and maintain communities that may last over many generations, bending - or sometimes breaking - with the winds of history. Social anthropology was a natural match for my curiosity about how people interact, and about how the microcosms of families, life-cycles and villages refract and impact the macrocosms of state, society and history. How families make history is one of my central questions.

I began studying anthropology at the University of Edinburgh in 1960. Since then I have taught anthropology and development studies at Cambridge and the University of California Santa Barbara. My main areas of fieldwork have been Uganda, Ghana, Malaysia and Catalonia. I returned to Edinburgh after my retirement, which has allowed me even greater freedom to research and ponder the complexities of human society.