Vol. 6 · No. 1 · 2002

Thomas Widlok

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This interview took place at James Woodburn's home in Cambridge, England, on 30 March 2001, where James has now retired from teaching at the London School of Economics and Political Science. However, on the same day as the interview James drove down to Brighton to attend the ASA conference on 'Rights, Claims and Entitlements' held at the University of Sussex. In June 2001 a symposium on 'Property and Equality' was held in his honour at the new Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle (Germany), and James is also a member of the organising committee for the 19th Conference on Hunting and Gathering Societies (CHAGS 9) held in Edinburgh in September 2002. It is clear that he has no intention of resigning from anthropology or more specifically from hunter-gatherer studies, which he has influenced since conducting field research with the Hadza of Tanzania (then Tanganyika) in the late 1950s and since his appearance at the 'Man the Hunter' conference in 1966 and many more hunter-gatherer conferences since then. At the LSE, where he spent most of his professional career, he supervised numerous research projects on hunter-gatherers all over the world but also other projects, including work on pastoral and agricultural peoples in East Africa, the region that he knows best.