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 as an undergraduate at the University of Edinburgh in 1960, and got my Ph.D. there in 1967. Since then I have taught social 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 in 2005 after my retirement. Having more leisure has allowed me even greater freedom to research and ponder the complexities of human society. Currently I am reflecting on ‘the virtues of vague’: the interplay between vagueness and precision in the making of knowledge.