Looking skyward for economic opportunity and diversity (Malcolm McColl First Nation Series Book 6)

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Drifter's Gold Blanding, Don. Burton's enthusiasm for unconventional topics Islamic sects in London, world fairs, small island territories, zoos , his willingness to lead, ease with laughter, youthful curiosity about people and things, and loyalty to his colleagues has brightened the University of California at Berkeley for a long time. I can not remember the precise circumstances under which I first met Burton Benedict, although I recall vividly that I held him in great awe.

He was, after all, among the few scholars in the Anglophone world and, more precisely, in North America, who had long-term experience in the Indian Ocean, a tract of territory that held great fascination for me as a budding anthropologist who was drawn to Madagascar. When I entered the graduate program at Berkeley in , Burton's name was nearly synonymous with the islands of Mauritius and the Seychelles, where he had worked as an ethnographer in the late s, and in and then , respectively.

My awe was a sentiment shared by many of my young peers, a feeling that did not diminish with ease upon one's first encounter with him. More precisely, if you did not know Burton you might fear him--he seemed, after all, very proper and reserved, at least in his appearance. For one, he always wore a suit and tie and, for another, he preferred a pince-nez to a pair of reading glasses.

As a result, young students who had just emerged from their college years were generally uncertain what to make of him. I remember that it took me some time before I had the courage to approach Burton and speak to him of my interests. As I soon found, however--as did the many others who sought his guidance and counsel--Burton embodied the very best qualities that one could hope for in a mentor. He was brilliant, thoughtful, extraordinarily fair, and, well, at times, very funny. As I soon learned, for example, we two shared three things in common. The first was merely a starting point for establishing rapport: The second and, clearly, more important fact was a deep commitment to the study of societies in the Indian Ocean, a territory far too frequently neglected by anthropologists and even, at times, cartographers.

The third was a more esoteric and thus whimsical interest: Whereas I had had a pet snake for several decades, Burton's life was marked by his caring for a host of scaly creatures. As I soon learned, when I first met him he not only owned if I recall correctly several horned chameleons, but he could also do a killer imitation of a barking gecko. Geckos aside, it is, of course, Burton's scholarly activities and sharp mind that made him such an extraordinary mentor in graduate school and beyond. Burton has never been afraid to think outside the box; for this reason, students with radical or eclectic ideas would wisely seek his advice and training.

Burton would, in turn, subtly assist them in refining their ideas into workable projects, always insisting upon intellectual rigor throughout, piling your arms high with books and articles to take home, digest, and later critique for him. Among the most memorable experiences for me was his dissertation writing seminar. This was an astounding experience for several of us as we worked together, under his tutelage, on such topics as the folklore of bestiality on the Brazilian pampas, the performative displays of mafia trials in southern Italy, the gendered nature of power in Malagasy spirit possession, and the tension between rural and coastal identities in Kenya.

In addition to the intellectual challenges of our group effort, elaborate exercises in gourmet cooking were also central to the seminar enterprise. These paired activities fostered a deep sense of kinship among us as we worked together under Burton, refining our projects and theoretical arguments. As a scholar, too, Burton has always been a maverick in the field, albeit a cautious and thoughtful one.

What I mean is this: Burton's theoretical concerns have been guided consistently by the pristine logic of British structuralism, and in this sense one could receive no better training from any of his peers. As a result, his writings from four decades ago on Mauritius remain essential reading within anthropology, standing as tacit reminders of the truly complex nature of inequality in pluralistic societies.

More generally, his approach was so appealing even when many students of my generation pooh-poohed British anthropology as stodgy, static, and old-fashioned in part because of the subtle humor that inevitably laces his understanding of human behavior. Men, Women and Money in the Seychelles could have been written as a straight and serious work authored by one man alone, an ethnographer entrenched solely in the rigors of methodical data collection.

Instead, he co-authored this with his wife, Marion Benedict. As a result, this book consistently teases the reader into considering what precisely defines the essence of ethnographic writing. It is important to note that these two authors chose not to blend their ideas so as to produce one united voice.

Instead, each claimed one half of the book, adding, interestingly, little commentary on the other's section. The book, then, is an intriguing experiment in anthropological writing, part survey, part memoir, part fiction, where one can even find humor in the deadpan of statistical analysis. This was indeed a ground-breaking work in anthropology, a proto-post-modern exercise, if you will, and one published well before more reflexive and self-absorbed texts began to flood the discipline a decade later. By the time I was working under Burton's tutelage, however, it is important to realize that he had already started to move away from the Indian Ocean and on to other projects.

For one, he was fascinated by the world of collecting although he himself may not have labeled it as such. Thus, he had begun to write on the phenomenon of worlds fairs, publishing a stunning work in both theoretical and visual terms that addressed deeply entrenched Euro-American desires to display cultures, animals, and environments to curious publics.

Such concerns led him to experiment with visual media, so that his scholarly, printed work later yielded an award-winning film on this topic as well. Who else was doing this sort of thing at Berkeley at the time? In fact, most of us--students and faculty alike--hardly knew how to think about visual media, yet there was Burton in the thick of it. From worlds fairs he then shifted his attention to museums: In a few short years Burton transformed the dusty and underfunded space of the Lowie Museum into the vibrant and, it seemed, finally 20th century Hearst Museum, where his curatorial decisions were driven by a cautious, thoughtful interest in the politics of display.

Most recently, Burton's work has focused on zoological parks, where earlier scholarly writings have now given way to the pleasures of docent work based--where else? In short, there has always been something magical about Burton's qualities as a teacher and mentor. Clearly his skills include his intellectual rigor and original character. Yet his skills run deeper than this. In graduate school, one always knew that Burton would consider even the most mis-guided concerns seriously, assisting students in refining their ideas so that they finally, and ultimately, made sense.

Sometimes you had to listen or watch carefully--if you were taking up too much of his time as graduate students inevitably do , he always had a subtle way of leading you to the door as if you yourself had made the decision to do so. I now find myself using such techniques when confronted with overly talkative students of my own. But there were never any short-cuts--he always seemed to have time for you. When I completed my dissertation, for instance, he went over the entire manuscript page-by-page, inserting comments as he went along, deciphering his often illegible script, and refining half-baked ideas in the making.

This same meticulous quality has always characterized his own scholarship. One is indeed blessed in knowing Burton Benedict. Burton Benedict, emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote his Harvard honors thesis on the adjustment problems of second generation Chinese in Boston. His received his Ph. He prepared himself further for field work with a year as senior research fellow at the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University where he created an "Annotated Bibliography Relating to the Sociology of Muslim Peoples. When he went out to Mauritius under a grant from the Colonial Social Science Research Council he was looking at the political and economic structures of the whole society.

He found himself in a richly heterogeneous country and began his work on "Stratification in Plural Societies. In the appended two articles by Benedict one sees a move from keen observer to committed participant. His oral history describes, among many things, this evolution in his practice of anthropology. Benedict offers in this oral history an compelling look at his profession.

His lifelong interest in museums and the ordering and interpreting of material evidence, and his gifts as a teacher and particular skills as a raconteur, were a fortuitous blend for an interviewee. As Benedict thinks back to his professors at Harvard, his research at the Institute of Islamic Studies, his fieldwork in Mauritius in the late s, and his several visits to the Seychelles, he summons up still-bright images of people and place. His years at the London School of Economics, where he taught from to , introduced him to a brilliant crowd of friends and further made of him a man of at least two continents.

As in Britain, so in the Berkeley years, to , Benedict took on administrative assignments that took him straight to the inside track, a place where he functioned comfortably, and from which he reports. We were delighted that Burton Benedict agreed to be interviewed, and the oral history was initiated in August, The interviews took place at Burton and Marion Benedict's rather hard-to-reach-the-first-time multi-storied aerie in north Berkeley. The initial meeting, a planning meeting, was in his study, a generous museum of a room with a view, lined with the traditional academic's bookshelves, but also a treasury of pots and rugs and statues and art and artifacts, the kind of room you wish your host would vacate for an hour or so, bidding you, "Make yourself at home!

So we moved down a story to the living room, but the ghostly music and chatter were still there. Settling for the bottom floor of the house, we finished the interviews free of feedback, although for me regrettably away from the treasury above! The interviews were conducted in a chronological manner. We started with Burton Benedict's family and his singular childhood, both sources of excellent stories with well-cast characters. He offered these tales somewhat hesitantly, thinking perhaps it was "all too much," but I seized on them. Surely they are important to the oral history, I thought, because they introduce the researcher to the evolving charm and adept social skills of this anthropologist who went on to operate so effectively at all levels, from the proverbial village hut to drawing room.

Certainly it must be in the definition of anthropology, the ability to function at many social and cultural levels, but Benedict seemed particularly able to make it work. Thus it was that when he came to Berkeley, as William Simmons says in the Introduction, he "brought exciting new intellectual directions to [the department].

After the interviewing was completed and transcribed, the edited oral history was returned to Benedict. He reviewed it carefully, responding to queries, checking names and so on, and strenuously black-penciling the nearly continual counterpoint of "[laughter]". He declared that things were either funny or they were not; he objected to the inclusion of the transcriber's parenthetically indicated merriment.

While stage-directions are typically included in oral history transcripts, in this case it had looked a bit like a laugh track throughout. But I hope the reader will take from tone and content the spirit of amusement and bemusement that frequently marked the twenty or so hours of interviewing. Benedict's is one in the series of University of California Department of Anthropology interviews. Several earlier oral histories completed with anthropologists George and Mary Foster and J.

Desmond Clark and Elizabeth Colson painted memorable pictures of personalities and issues and the excitement of locating one's particular interests in what was then a very new profession. The title of his oral history introduces him: An Anthropologist's Life in the 20th Century: His wife, the late Mary LeCron Foster was a linguistic anthropologist and worked in peace and conflict studies. Paleoanthropologist and Africanist the late J. Desmond Clark's oral memoir reaches around the globe in its scope, and includes supplementary dialogues with other colleagues doing early human studies.

Elizabeth Colson, who came to Berkeley in , continues her fieldwork with the Gwembe Tonga of Zambia, began in through the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute. William Simmons, formerly of the department at Berkeley, now at Brown University, accepted our invitation to write an introduction to his friend, Burton. Kantor, University Archivist emeritus, read the final draft with his usual critical and appreciative eye.

The Anthropology Emeritus Lecture Series web site that she has created leads to an abundance of historical material, speeches, photographs, a rich collection of department history, to which we now add the Burton Benedict oral history. The Regional Oral History Office was established in to augment through tape-recorded memoirs the Library's materials on the history of California and the West. This symbol indicates that a tape or tape segment has begun or ended. A guide to the tapes follows the transcript. We should start by you telling me about your parents on both sides--how they got to Baltimore.

I guess the first thing to say is that I'm an only child among four parents, which probably accounts for a number of things. Well, my family were German Jews, and they came to this country, on my mother's side, I guess in the middle of the nineteenth century, that is, after the revolutions of when a lot of people left Europe and came to America. They started into department stores.

Yes, what in Baltimore is pronounced "Hosheld's. My grandmother was called Kann, and there used to be a department store called S. Kann and Sons, one in Washington and one in Baltimore. They did not arrive penniless. They brought some capital with them. They were all reform Jews. They were very Protestant Jews, very non-religious. Baltimore was a city that was divided between Jews and non-Jews and they each built their own castles, as it were. I think that's much less the case now, but it certainly was then. I don't really know. They tended to go to the cities that were commercially lively, and Baltimore was a seaport.

It was an important city. But they went to Baltimore; they went to Cleveland; they went to Cincinnati; they went to New York, obviously; they went to Boston. There was another tradition of the poorer German Jews who really became sort of itinerant merchants and went to the South where they occupied a niche. It was interesting because this--again, we're talking about the middle of the nineteenth century. You had the landowners, the plantation owners, because this was pre-Civil War, you had the slaves and the poor whites, but the middle stratum was very much occupied by Jews.

That is, the non-Jewish whites weren't storekeepers. So the Jews occupied that niche, which is kind of a traditional Jewish thing that happened in Europe, too. I don't know the details. I know that a lot of them became extremely successful. One of them, for instance, again a distant relation, operated something called the Cone--which by that time was spelled C-O-N-E--Mills, which made all the denim in the world and which was in North Carolina. They also intermarried a lot, these families. That's on my mother's side. My father's side was the same kind of thing. I think the first one arrived here in And some of them were Sephardic Jews who came from Spain and Portugal.

My paternal grandmother's maiden name was Nez, and that was, of course a Spanish name. My paternal grandfather, whom I didn't know, was a manufacturer. He had a clothing factory and he manufactured pajamas and underwear and shirts. He had two factories. He was quite successful, became very prominent in the Jewish community, and he founded a major private school, where there's a bronze bust of him, in Baltimore.

So that was my father's side. They lived in big houses and they had horses and carriages and later chauffeur-driven cars. It was that kind of an atmosphere. So--I don't come from a poverty-stricken background. Anyhow, that's the background, and I still have, of course, relatives in Baltimore. I don't go there very much, but I still do have cousins. That older generation--they were really quite remarkable people. There are lots of nice anecdotes about them, which I won't burden you with.

Did they function for the community the way that generation of Jews in San Francisco did? Creating the museums and cultural institutions? I don't think as much as they did here, nor were they accepted as easily as they were here. Here there seems to have been very little anti-Semitism--at least on a comparative basis--whereas there really were restrictions on them in the East. Of course they came to Philadelphia too, and they did the same thing in Philadelphia. I don't know how directly those people are related to me, or how directly I'm related to them.

My grandfather's name was Oppenheim. They were a manufacturing company. My father more or less inherited the company, he and his brother--the sister married a man from Chicago. But my father hated it and he said he didn't want to spend his life "biting buttonholes" was the way he put it. By this time it was the twenties, and of course in everything sort of blew up and the company failed. And they sold out. It didn't fall flat, but they sold out to an underwear company called BVD.

Do you remember BVD? I don't know whether they still exist. What did it stand for, I wonder. My uncle, my father's brother who was a very sharp businessman, went with them to BVD and he did quite well there. But my father didn't--he was really glad to get out of it. What he did was--it was shortly after that that he and my mother were divorced, and what he did was to go into government, and he became part of the New Deal.

First he was involved in one of these alphabets that Roosevelt set up called the Prison Industries Reform Administration, or something like that. Anyhow, he went around inspecting prisons. A lot of prisoners in those days made clothing. Of course the unions hated that because it was unfair competition--which it was.

He was very much interested in prison reform. It was a familiar but quite different thing from what he'd done earlier in his life.

A Social Anthropologist in Britain and Berkeley

He went to Washington and lived in Washington. And then after that he got into the wages and hours division of the Department of Labor. His job was under the NRA--and you remember what that was. His job was to help set wages in the various industries throughout the country. And he set up boards.

The boards consisted of a representative of manufacturers, a representative of labor, and a representative of the public--a disinterested citizen, if there is such a creature, which, of course, was the hard one to find. He did that and he did it very successfully. He got some very interesting people in there.

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He would meet people and sort of assess them for this. He continued to do that right up until the beginning of the war. And then he died at the early age of forty-seven. Okay, so that's what he did. That was my father. My mother who's still alive, as you know, she was married when she was eighteen, and she had me when she was twenty--I guess that's what they did then.

At any rate, after the divorce we moved in with her mother for a couple of years. We were still in Baltimore. My grandmother spoiled me and so did her servants: And then my mother married Howard Benedict, who was my stepfather, and Howard Benedict was also from Baltimore. No--not between my parents. It was traumatic for me, but it wasn't for them.

Well, it must have been for them, but they were very careful--I never saw them fight, never heard them fight. And they made arrangements so that there was never any dispute over my custody. I was entirely under the custody of my mother, but I could visit my father when it was convenient for him. I usually would spend a month or so with him in the summers--something like that.

Or he'd come and see me, or we'd go out. But there wasn't any--that part of it was really done very smoothly. Let's see, all right, I was eight years old when they were divorced. My mother and Howard Benedict married two years later in when I was ten. And we moved to New York and lived in the village. So it was a life that was entirely different. It was a very theatrical life. Nobody got out of bed until eleven o'clock in the morning, and they didn't go to bed until three o'clock in the morning.

And there was a lot of drinking and speakeasies and all of that stuff before the repeal. It was really quite a different kind of life. And we lived, as I said, in Greenwich Village, and I went to a wonderful school called the City and Country School, a progressive school, just a terrific school. It was in the Village on Twelfth Street. I can tell you a lot about that school, but I think that's too irrelevant. But it was very important to me. It was very interesting and I really liked it and it was just altogether a wonderful school. I wish that there were more schools like it.

And so we were there for two years, and then my stepfather was offered the position of director of publicity at RKO studios in Hollywood. He was from Baltimore and his family was there, so he came down there all the time. He had started life as a newspaperman and he had worked for--I guess he started on the Baltimore Sun, and then he went to New York and he had a hard time breaking in. There was a very famous columnist in those days called Heywood Broun, and he wrote to Heywood Broun, wrote him a very funny letter, something about how hard it was to break into the newspaper game.

It was a very amusing letter and Heywood Broun published it, and so he got an offer and so he became a newspaperman and then from that he got into the theatrical stuff. He was always very closely allied to Baltimore. His mother was there, his sister was there, his brother, who was a socialist, was in Washington and ran something called the Editorial Research Reports , which he ran all his life. It was a wonderful thing. He did research to give material to editors all over the country to write their editorials. You wonder why editors know how to write their editorials, it's because of my stepuncle.

At any rate, he was a very interesting guy. He married twice, and his second wife was a pacifist. They were friends of Alger Hiss, they were--but I don't want to go into detail, that's too peripheral. But you thrived in this atmosphere. They didn't send you off to boarding school--that's interesting. Yes, they did eventually, but not at that point. So we're now at First two years in New York, and in we moved to Hollywood.

So she sent me to a boarding school, in Covina of all places. I absolutely detested it. I can't tell you how much I hated it. At one point I got up--we were allowed home once a month, and at the end of the time I got up on the roof and I said, "I'm going to jump off the roof if you make me go back there. I did go back, but I only stayed there for one year.

Well, she was always really stage-struck, my mother was--still is. She was a real twenties girl. Bobbed hair and those bras that made you flat-chested. She just loved it. And my stepfather was a pretty romantic character, and really very amusing, and of course he knew all those people and they all came to the house. We used to have movie stars and directors and writers, and also it was of course an extremely interesting time to be in Hollywood. From to the war, in fact through the war, when you had all these German intellectuals who came over and settled in Hollywood.

So there were some really major figure there and very important people. Now this is a little diversion, but I think it's worth making. One of my stepfather's friends was Clifford Odets, and Clifford Odets took a shine to me--he just liked me. So he would take me around, and he was at that point--he had of course migrated to Hollywood.

He had done early plays in New York for the theater group, you know, that sort of radical theater group in New York who did Waiting for Lefty --the Group Theater, that's what it was called. At any rate, he took me along. He was very interested in painting and he collected paintings, and I remember he would take me--I had a little apartment, this was later, I've skipped some time--he would take me to his house, and we'd look at these paintings until I'd say, "Oh, I like that. He'd say, "Okay, you can take it and hang it on your wall until I come and get it again.

He would invite me to his parties. He said, "You should come to these parties and see how these people are. I'd go to these parties, and they'd be very small parties, and they would consist of Charlie Chaplin and Oona, Edward G. Well, those were the parties that he was giving anyhow. But he just said, "You come along. They would get very excited--this was during the time of the Un-American Activities Committee, which they all hated, of course, because of the Hollywood Ten and the witch hunt that was going on.

It was very political. I remember one evening Chaplin, who really was a very simple kind of man, a really poor boy brought up in the East End of London. He wasn't sophisticated or well educated or anything like that, but my goodness. I'm going to make an old-fashioned Keystone Cops slapstick comedy about the Un-American Activities Committee, because they are all really basically comic characters. And I'm going to get all those old actors--I still know where they are--Chester Conklin and all these people. Then he started creating the script in the living room.

He played all the different parts and ran around and jumped over the sofa and he did all kinds of stuff. He said one character would have a suitcase labeled "Atomic Secrets. It was just an amazing thing to sit and watch this. It was wonderful for me and I just loved it. Clifford wrote some plays--and we're really talking about a later time at Harvard--and then he'd try them out.

One of his plays, he tried it out in Boston, and he called me at Harvard and he said, "You come to the opening night. Bring a couple of your friends. It was called The Big Knife. He was trying to cope with being successful. He wasn't good at being successful. He had two characters in the play named for me: At the end of the play he said to me, "Okay, now we'll go up to my room and we'll have some drinks.

He said to these two friends of mine--here we were, three freshman--"Okay, what did you think about the play. What was wrong with it? What about this scene, what about that scene? I mean his early plays, Golden Boy , were about his own background, about Lower East Side Jews who were poor and struggling. That was something he knew, and he did it very well, and he had a great ear for the language.

When he got to Hollywood, he was faced with, "Create. Here's a half a million dollars. He really couldn't do it. He was bitter about it, but he really felt he should be on the outside criticizing. On the other hand, he was taking their money. So he got himself into a bad state about that. Well, later on I went to England, and he died fairly young. He did some paintings. I have paintings, and I have other things of his. I think I learned something about drama, and something about the way to present things.

And something about the personalities of these famous people and how there was an image created about them, and they weren't really like that underneath, that kind of thing. This group of ten people, all of whom are famous names, they were only comfortable with each other? They were all close friends. Many of them had been in the Group Theater. For instance, I know John Garfield was. And Stella Adler was, of course. And politically they were in accord.

Well, that's a good point. They were all famous, so fame didn't enter into it. They weren't showing off to each other. Charlie Chaplin was showing off, sure, but he was really concerned about the Un-American Activities Committee, and he had this idea, and of course we all got hysterical because he did it so magnificently. He couldn't move without--he was enormously graceful, so we were all laughing about it. But there wasn't any sort of jockeying for position or competition for status or anything like that.

That was not part of it. So these were all people that were very comfortable with each other. I was simply out of the circle--I didn't belong, I was just an outsider, was neither here nor there--so that I was no threat for them. They kind of enjoyed having a young guy there, and they would be very nice to me and everything and so it was very pleasant.

When I got out of the boarding school I was put into public school, the first public school I'd ever been to. And of course, what had happened to me in all this private schooling that I had was that I'd learned pretty good work habits, which I'm afraid you don't learn in public school. So if the teacher said, "This is your homework and do it," I would do it. I remember being absolutely astonished that other kids would come to school without having done their homework. It would never occur to me. It just wasn't in the realm of possibility. So I had very good work habits, and so, of course, I did quite well.

Well, was when I graduated from high school. So it would have been four years before that? And I continued to do very well scholastically and I made some very, very interesting friends. A lot of young girls whose mothers had brought them to Hollywood to get them into the movies. One of them was Lana Turner. Another one was Judy Garland. They were never there, but they were technically in my class, yes.

I don't know that they were in my class, but they were in the school. I think I saw them once or twice, but I didn't know them certainly. Anyhow, I did make two or three friends who were quite remarkable. One was an autodidact, and he came from a very poor family--lived way down in the bottom of Los Angeles somewhere, and he made his living by selling newspapers on the corner, when cars would come.

But he taught himself--he read Plato and he taught himself Greek! Then there were several--I won't go into all of them because that's too peripheral, but there were basically four or five of us who became great friends, and they would all come up to my house, and we would play music together. We had gramophone records, what were then I guess called phonograph records. In England they would have been called gramophone records, and of course they were 78s, and we learned to appreciate music that way.

And we would just come and sit around for hours playing these records. No, none of them were Jews. In fact, I think I--oh, I forgot to tell you, I never got into the name change thing. I have to go back to do that, because that is important. My father, who I think was an anti-Semitic Jew--anyhow he didn't have much use for the Jews--he said to me one day in or '35, "I want you to change your name, because in my time here in Washington I have found that I was unable to get positions that I wanted to have in government simply because my name is Jewish and they wouldn't take me.

And it makes me furious, and I think it's rotten, unfair, etc. I said, "All right. That doesn't seem to me to make much sense. So if I'm going to change my name, why don't I change it to Benedict, which is not so overtly Jewish, and that would make some kind of sense. I mean that was my stepfather's name. And it's an anglicization of probably, Baruch. On the other hand, he was determined that I should change my name, and he reluctantly accepted that finally.

I don't think he ever liked it, but he accepted it. So I changed my name, I guess it was in , to Burton Benedict and that's what I've been ever since. Did you talk about religion with your family? Is that as close as you would have gotten to issues of what it was to be a Jew? I remember my mother thought--don't forget how young she was--my mother thought that I ought to have some religious education, just because she thought you ought to.

So I was sent to Sunday school. Of course, reform Jews had Sunday school, not Saturday school. So I was sent to Sunday school, and I went two or three times, and I didn't like it, and they started teaching you some phrases in Hebrew, and I came home and I said, "I don't like going there, and I don't like it. You don't have to go there anymore. That was my religious education. And then my mother at one point was starting to tell me Bible stories, but I didn't like them as well as I liked Uncle Wiggily or something. So nothing really happened.

We never discussed it. I mean, they were all interrelated, and my grandmother had been married twice and so on and so on. Well, anyhow, they would all come together in these giant feasts on Friday night, but nothing religious was ever done. We never lit candles, we never said prayers, we just argued with each other. The uncles all argued with each other. Some of them were Democrats, and some of them were Republicans.

So they would argue together.

So I never really had any religious instruction at all. Well, what they had done, before my time, was they'd formed parallel clubs. They had their country club and their golf course, and everything was exactly parallel to the gentile things. I've inherited this business. I think there's a considerable streak of anti-Semitism in me, which is absurd for an anthropologist. I mean intellectually, of course. But I never, I didn't choose Jewish friends, and of course I didn't marry a Jew either, so it was a real crash course in assimilation. Some of them were. And I had a couple of friends who were bright, but they weren't close friends, but we were good friends.

But not all of them--I think the brightest kid in our class was called Cooper. And I didn't go out with Jewish girls either. These friends of mine, one of them is still a close friend, and I was his best man at his wedding. About three weeks ago I went down to L. So he's the only one that's left of that crew. Two of them committed suicide and one died.

There were five of them. We lived up in the Hollywood Hills in a biggish house. We had a couple of servants.

We didn't have a chauffeur-driven car--we had two Buicks. Summers I would spend often with my father. Meanwhile, and this is of some interest I think, my father much later remarried, and he married another Baltimorean called Ellen Frank, who just died. She came from an extremely interesting family. Her mother was Rose Ellen Hecht, and she was related to the Hechts and the Gerstles here, and the Zellerbachs, and the Fleishhackers, all of those people.

Also, she had been married twice. Gertrude was very close to Rose Ellen and particularly close to her son Julian, who is still alive and a good friend of mine. He's five years older than I am and we see each other usually at least once or twice a year, either in Paris or London or here or somewhere. Gertrude used to come over and visit them, and when I went to Paris--this was a later thing when I went to Gertrude's apartment, and Gertrude had died, but Alice was still there.

Shall I tell you now about it? Or do you want to wait? Something to look forward to. Anyway, it was pretty interesting. I became very close to that family, and in the summers the Steins had a camp, a summer camp in Rangeley, Maine. They had that place since around , and the families always went up there. It became a huge encampment, in which they each built a house. I would go up there in the summer. We just had a splendid time. Or sometimes my father would take us on a trip. We went to Nova Scotia once.

We went to a ranch in Colorado. I would spend the summer with them, and I really loved my stepmother. You mean had they mapped out a career for me? I was allowed to do pretty nearly whatever interested me, and of course I had millions of hobbies and collected like crazy. And I had huge electric train sets. When I took chemistry, I made my own chemistry lab. I was always crazy about animals, and even in New York I had aquariums with salamanders--in Greenwich Village you can't have much other than salamanders. So when we moved to Hollywood, it seemed to me I could have some animals.

It was difficult to have animals--we always had a dog, of course, or two--so I started having birds. I saw all these marvelous exotic birds which you could get in those days, and which I had not seen before. Mostly Australian birds, which are pretty colorful. So I started out with little finches, and eventually I ended up with birds. I had some aviaries in which they would fly together, but I wanted to breed them, so a lot of them were separated. I don't know, I must have had fifteen, sixteen aviaries, I would think.

Not as successful as I would be now, because I didn't know as much. Well, this is turning out to be quite--I don't know when we'll ever get to anthropology! I think you're right. They are by far the most interesting. Certainly in the biographies I read, they're the most interesting. A friend of mine has just sent me a book that he wrote on George Perkins Marsh, who was a pioneer in conservation and involved with the Smithsonian--well, you're right, after Marsh's thirtieth birthday he was getting much duller.

Anyhow, do you want to go back to the birds? I'm interested in who was your mentor for the birds. Or whether you just did it from books. I did it from books. As I look back on it, my mother and stepfather were very busy entertaining and getting into this whole Hollywood business, and that's why they'd sent me to the boarding school. When I came back, they really basically didn't want to be bothered with me very much because they had all these other things.

I mean, they were always very nice to me and everything. I didn't suffer in any way, I assure you. When I got this hobby of birds--I started out with a couple of birds in a cage of course, and then I wanted to breed them, and there were a lot of bird farms in Southern California, where there are a lot of breeders. And then I found out that there's something called the Avicultural Society, so I joined the Avicultural Society, and then I began to read all about them, and then I got some more birds.

We had a couple working for us then, who were African Americans. The man I guess was part Mexican, Brian Howard, and he was really nice and I liked him very much, and he got interested in what I was doing, so we would go out on expeditions to get these birds. I still wasn't old enough to drive, so we'd go out and bring them home and put them in the aviary.

And he helped me build the aviaries. They were all exotic. In fact, you were not allowed to keep native birds. I did, I think, have some California quail. And I guess I had a magpie once, too. I had a few mammals, a fox and a monkey and so on, but they were not great successes. I had chipmunks and ground squirrels and that kind of animal. But mostly I just concentrated--I got more and more interested in the birds. At one point I had--this is really a terrible story! What happened was that I thought that I should have my own pet shop. My parents went off somewhere, I guess to Europe or Mexico or someplace, and they left me alone with these two servants in their house.

I thought I would like to have this pet shop, so Brian and I went down and we found--now this was in the thirties so everybody was suffering. I wasn't suffering, but everybody was suffering. So I went down--do you know Los Angeles? Of course I was under age, but Brian was there saying, "Oh, yes, it's all right if he wants to do that he can do that. And then I had to go and buy all the supplies for it--I had to buy bird seed and the little cages and cuttle bones and all this. We found the Mercantile Supply Company down in L. We had to have goldfish, so we had to have a tank with goldfish.

No, it didn't occur to me, never. Anyhow, so then Brian and Woody, his wife Woody, said to me, "You know, you've got to go to school"--this was in the summer--"Who's going to look after the pet store? She can live in our guest room. We went down to Long Beach and we found this woman, and she seemed to be a nice woman. She came up, and I showed her the guest room, and she said, "Oh, that's very nice.

When my parents came home they found a strange woman in the guest room. They found just stacks of bills! At any rate, so there it all was. Of course the woman was packed out of there pretty quickly, but what to do about the store, which was full of all this stuff? My parents said, "Look, you've got to get rid of that pet store. You can't have a strange person living in the house. But at any rate all of the stuff was taken and moved to the house of the cook that we had, Clara, to her house in Watts. She had a big back yard. We built aviaries in the big back yard in Watts, and she had all these birds and all these goldfish and all this stuff in her house for a long time--until I realized that she was gradually selling it all off.

You can have aviaries in the back yard, just don't do anything like that again. I built some of them, along with Brian. We built them together. I hammered away, but he did most of it. And then at one point finally, when it was getting to be a fairly big thing, my parents for my birthday or something had this bank of aviaries built. I was pretty indulged, as you're gathering, I think. I think so, because I tried to find out everything I could about them. I had this avicultural magazine, and my hero was the Marquis of Tavistock who was a great aviculturist in England, and he--Marquis of Tavistock is the second title of the Duke of Bedford, so he became Duke of Bedford eventually--he wrote and he started collecting birds.

And there are some now in the Bronx Zoo and in zoos all over the world. He wrote a book on parrots, so I was crazy to get that book, and he wrote articles for the aviculture magazine. The Avicultural Society in California would have meetings every month where you'd visit somebody's house, where they had the aviaries, and then somebody would give a talk and we'd have refreshments and so on. Brian would drive me to these meetings. So I went to all those meetings, and I learned a lot about it.

I learned that the proper way to house birds is not in a cage that goes vertically but in a cage that goes horizontally because birds don't fly like helicopters. You learn a lot of things like that, so yes, I was pretty knowledgeable about it, and I read a lot. I remember reading William Beebe's pheasants book. They're obviously beautiful to look at, but also, of course, the fact that they fly is so extraordinary.

And the more you learn about why and how they fly, the more amazing it is. These terribly light--an eagle, for example, which has a wingspan of six or seven feet only weighs about eight pounds. Of course, birds' bones are hollow and they have no water in their bodies except for their bladder, which is why it makes such a mess on your car--because there is no distinction in their intestinal tract. I was pretty solitary as I grew up. I got friends when I was in high school. As a small child, I certainly played a lot by myself, mostly with little animals.

I had hundreds of little animals. I know that when my mother and stepfather were married, my stepfather--at least so my mother said--didn't want any children. In fact, it's a curious thing, neither he nor his brother, nor his sister had any children. But he didn't want any children.

And I think my mother must have not been happy with my father. I don't think they were very sexually compatible--my mother has more or less indicated that. And when my father married my stepmother, he didn't want any more children either. Of course, I didn't want any of them to have any more children! I didn't mind that at all. It's never worried me that I was an only child. And I was horribly spoiled by many other women in my family.

It was really quite disgusting when you stop and look at it--well, I don't really think it was disgusting, I think it was great. I remember after the divorce, and I was living with my grandmother, my grandmother sent me and her chauffeur--because I wanted to go to Schwarz's toy store in New York, she sent me and Julius, the chauffeur, a German who had worked for my grandparents since he was a boy, and we went to Schwarz's, and I just bought lots of toys, and I got away with it.

That ability to accrue things--I wonder whether eventually that becomes an interest in material culture. I think so, because I always had some idea from the time I was quite young that if you collected things that you had some responsibility towards them. That is, that you had to find out about them, and you had to do something with them. It wouldn't do to just take them and stash them away somewhere, and that was not something that appealed to me at all, hoarding. I wasn't interested in having a lot of stuff and hiding it away. From the time I was small, I always had bookcases full of all my things, and I would try to arrange them, and when I had lot of little toy animals, I would try to arrange them on the shelves in natural habitats with little trees around and so on.

I'd have Africa or India, and I'd put a little label on it. That was an interest in displaying the objects, it wasn't an interest in how people used objects which is something that came much later.

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