An interview with Dr Nicholas James, Lucy Bye-Fellow and Director of Studies in Social Anthropology
As a teenager, I sensed that anthropology would be comprehensive enough to make for worthwhile study but my family vetoed the idea (not least because it entailed coming to Cambridge). So I devoted myself to theatre. A year or two after graduation, amid a sopping field in the English Midlands, I told my poor boss that I wanted to understand the whole world. That notion led me from Shetland to the frightful stone desert of Arabia until I found myself back at university, now in the USA, where it dawned on me that I had arrived in anthropology after all — and that I was on intellectual fire.
What am I trying to achieve (I have been asked)? In those days, truth to tell, it was to work out what makes England so frustrating. Exploring urbanization in Mexico and India, I found, of course, that every way of life has both challenges and charms, and that we can discover how, expressed and recognized so variously in one tradition and another, people's expectations and aspirations depend on their values and norms and their social structure. Learning how to do that helped me, at last, to settle back in Europe.
Of the projects that I am working on now, the most fundamental is about how inhabitants contribute and adapt to the uncertainties thrown up by rapid urban change: how do people who do not know each other well manage and make sense of new social and ecological conditions? I have been listening, in India, to the priests at a group of ancient temples that has become surrounded, over the past couple of generations, by an expanding city. With so many people mingling, urban life exposes issues about change boldly, but by no means, of course, are cities the only places where we find ourselves striving to adapt.
Public events at home have now undone my equanimity but my students compensate for that. For, as explains the textbook that I press on them, anthropology is "a way of studying and comparing societies" that shows how "everything could have been different in our own". So there is hope. Yes, anthropology's revelations can be revolutionary and my students gentle revolutionaries — as I am witnessing in some who have graduated of late.
I feel so lucky to have been invited to help out in Lucy Cavendish College at a juncture in its history, of especially intense creativity. Most of my teaching is with beginners in social anthropology; and I remain responsible for those who go on to concentrate on anthropology. I try to help them to fulfil themselves by exploring the world's different ways of living and thought and by learning to explain such amazing diversity.