ABSTRACT
When Adam Kuper—professor of anthropology at Brunei University—was still editor of the international journal Current Anthropology, he instituted a series of interviews with some of the elder statesmen of the discipline—Claude Levi-Strauss, Clifford Geertz, Ernest Gellner, and so on. His idea was to get them to talk freely about their "life and times" and he was particularly interested in the people and ideas that had influenced them. Kuper is one of the better historians of the subject, and these fascinating dialogues will remain one of his better ideas for preserving "contemporary history." The editorial staff panicked however, and suffered visions of picketing from the animal rights activists and the like. So the author sent them a picture of himself/herself with a shotgun—ready actually to do nothing worse than the blast skeets out of the sky—which they published, but with misgivings.
