Interview with Thayer Scudder, May 20, 2003

CLIGGETT: -- Professor Thayer Scudder by Professor Lisa Cliggett on May 20th, 2003 at Cal Tech University, California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California in Professor Scudder's office. So, to get started, Ted, I think we had talked about doing a little bit of your early history and would you like to just [chuckle] offer your -- your early history on your own -- one of -- one of the kind of questions we have is what -- how did you find yourself in anthropology and -- and what was that trajectory of the discovery of anthropology and applied anthropology?

SCUDDER: I think that it's important to say from the start that serendipity plays a very important role in how one gets into one career or another. George Foster, of course, has made that point in regard to fieldwork, the role that 00:01:00serendipity plays in the kinds of questions one asks and what-have-you. But certainly, in terms of how I got into anthropology serendipity played a major role because when I was in secondary school my intention was to become an old-fashioned naturalist, biologist. Biology at that time was classical biology. Modern genetics and things of that nature had not occurred.

CLIGGETT: What time -- what time period are we talking about when you were in secondary school?

SCUDDER: This would've been 1944 to 1948 --

CLIGGETT: At Exeter?

SCUDDER: -- at Exeter, Philipps Exeter Academy. And I cannot remember a single thing I learned there but it was certainly four of the best years of my life because it encouraged all my extracurricular activities, all of which related to kinds of things I wanted to do. I do remember quite a bit of the biology 00:02:00actually as I'll mention later on. But my idea was to become a -- a naturalist in the Amazon dealing with mainly birds. I had read a whole bunch of the scholars -- or the naturalists who had writing on the Amazon like Thomas Barbour, B-A-R-B-O-U-R, and others and so, for example, at Exeter I took four years of Spanish. I became president of the Scientific Society to show that I was seriously interested in -- in science but -- and I did spend a lot of time chasing birds, bicycling down to -- to the ocean, Hampton Beach and Blueberry Port Harbor to do things of this nature. So, --

CLIGGETT: I -- I have to interrupt for just a second -- how did you even know about the Amazon when you were in high school? Where had you been exposed to the existence of a place called --

SCUDDER: Well, parents played a very important role here and my father was a -- 00:03:00a person -- although he was a professor of English literature at Swarthmore he had wanted to write his Ph.D. dissertation on Audubon but Audubon ironically at that time, in the 1920s, was not considered an appropriate person for a person in English Literature to write a -- a Ph.D. dissertation on. So, that -- what he would've loved to have done as a career, I think, was to be in forestry service and that kind of thing. So, I was tremendously influenced by -- by father's love of nature. He was a tremendous gardener. Also, a close family friend was Henry Seidel Canby who was the founder of the Saturday Review of Literature and he was the one who gave me my first binoculars. Also, in the summer I was, of course, a faculty brat at Swarthmore as a young -- before I went off to -- to Exeter but 00:04:00in the summer, we used to go to what in effect was a commune called [Yoping] Hill in the Berkshires of Connecticut which was a -- a commune of people in literature, not -- not flower people --

CLIGGETT: Okay [chuckle], I try to imagine this [chuckle].

SCUDDER: -- and not young people, people like the president of Vassar College, the founder of the Saturday Review of Literature, these were mainly people who were musicians, artists, poets, English literature, and what-have-you. And we all used to get together for common meals, for example, at a place called The Barn and [Yoping] Hill being in the Berkshires was a beautiful -- yoping because of foxes - was a beautiful location. I was the youngest child there. The next youngest child was several years older than me and trying very hard to be 00:05:00incorporated within those who were even older than him which, of course, made him think that I was useless which was his name for me was actually. [both chuckling] So, I was pretty much on my own during summer after summer after summer and I would spend the whole time in the woods looking at birds with my brother's dog, Peter, hiking around and building dams and -- and that kind of thing. So, --

CLIGGETT: And that -- that was foreshadowing for you [inaudible]

SCUDDER: This all foreshadowed my -- my desire to have a career which would perpetuate what I enjoyed as a child. And I can remember, for example, that I had certain mystery birds which I had never been able to identify who I literally spent hours and hours and hours -- one was the oven bird which had a beautiful flight song in the evening. It would go up into the sky circling 00:06:00around way up, you could just see it as a speck and it would do this beautiful flight song and then it would plummet down to the ground and it took me a long time to identify it. The flight song of the woodcock was another one. The song of the winter wren which only you will find in ravines. There were two mountains, Mount Race and Mount Everett just over the border in Massachusetts that my father used to take my brother and I up to and climbing up the ravines I would hear this beautiful song rippling in and out as we were climbing up these waterfalls. And, of course, it's a tiny little bird sort of creeping around within the foliage and going in and out of holes in dead trees, it took me ages to identify what this beautiful song was. So, anyhow, this is -- this -- this was the kind of career that I -- that I was headed for. When I graduated from Exeter and went to Harvard -- as I said I wasn't -- I wasn't interested in 00:07:00academics at all. I remember that I was about a C+ student at Exeter and the year I was a senior I think one my advisers told me that if I wanted to be at Harvard it would be useful if I'd bring my average up to a B -.

CLIGGETT: And did you?

SCUDDER: Yes. Yes. Yes, I -- I worked a little bit harder. I wasn't useless at Exeter, I was doing all of these birding and stuff like this but also, I was very much into extracurricular activities which probably would've gotten me into Harvard without the --

CLIGGETT: Uh-huh. What were those activities?

SCUDDER: I was chap -- captain of the cross-country corps -- team. I was president, as I mentioned, of the Scientific Society. I was president of the Biology Group. I was president of the Outing Club. I was president and founder of the Mountaineering Club and these were all, you see, activities which would take me outdoors.

CLIGGETT: Uh-huh.

SCUDDER: Cross-country, of course, you're running in the woods and what-have-you. Outing and Mountaineering Club -- the Outing, of course, took us 00:08:00out -- out of doors but the Mountaineering would take us into mountain areas and things of this nature. And these were interests which you -- which as you will see continued once I got to -- to Harvard. When I got to Harvard, again, because of all my work in biology I was allowed to skip all the biology courses that introductory students take. So, I was able to take courses that seniors and juniors were taking my first year so, that by the end of my sophomore year I'd pretty taken all the courses in biology at Harvard that I was interested in and so, then I began to fiddle around and look for other things. And I began to take archaeology courses, history courses, philosophy courses, and ended up in majoring in General Studies. So, to my -- and there, I guess, the importance of ending up with a B- did influence me because I had a gen -- I graduated with cum laude in General Studies, you see, a -- a B- in General Studies [chuckle] or 00:09:00something of that nature. So, but still I had the intention when I graduated from Harvard of still becoming a -- a naturalist except that then it was going to be a naturalist working in the mountains, mountain climbing because I had become a -- a fanatic on mountain climbing. I was president of the Harvard Mountaineering Club which is no question about it, the leading mountaineering club in the United States except for the American Alpine Club. And I was elected to the American Alpine Club at the age of maybe twenty-one or twenty-two because I had climbed the Grand Teton for example as a high school student, I had done first ascents in the Alaska Range -- in the McKinley Range, had led Harvard Mountaineering expeditions to Alaska, two of them -- no, one of them and another one to -- to British Columbia So, that mountaineering became an important 00:10:00desire. But along the way I got married. My wife, Molly, her father was a professor of industrial hygiene in the School of Public Health at Harvard and, So, I met Molly as a freshman and --

CLIGGETT: Was she also, a student at that time?

SCUDDER: Yeah, she was going into early childhood education and so, we decided to get married at the end of my sophomore year so, when we were both twenty. And So, that was a new factor. Then I have to mention one other thing which probably was an important factor in terms of eventually getting into anthropology. When I was in secondary school I started hitchhiking and during the next six years -- 00:11:00well, let's say the next five -- four or five -- four years I hitchhiked over 30,000 miles.

CLIGGETT: Throughout the US?

SCUDDER: Well, not just around the US, going up into -- into Canada. I was -- one Christmas we were going to go down to Cuba to spend Christmas in Cuba. So, we were going to hitch from Harvard down to Key Largo and then take the ferryboat across to Cuba but on the way, we were hit by an oil tanker on -- on the Florida Keys and so, that brought that expedition to a -- to a grinding halt because I was thrown out of the back of the truck and seriously enough injured that I had to go home. So, -- the hitchhiking though -- you know, back and forth across the United States, for example, two summers we would often alone or -- or with a friend we would leave and hitchhike from New England to Washington and 00:12:00then from Washington down through Oregon to California and then one time I came back to the Mississippi River and then turned around and went back out to Wyoming and then turned around and came back to -- to the East Coast. And so, that kind of mileage piles up. And, you know, you meet a fantastic range of people and hitchhiking was relatively safe at that particular time. Unfortunately, it's -- it's not an experience which young people can -- can do now without risk. But -- and even in -- in the -- this was mainly in the '40s, you see, that I was doing all of this hitchhiking, another time down to Tennessee to the Mississippi River to visit a roommate, this was when I was in high school -- in -- in secondary school. But even in the '50s there were four occasions when it would've been very easily for me to have gotten killed for one reason or another, you know, like the oil tanker hitting us but other times, you 00:13:00know, people trying to -- to rob you and stab you, things of this @@@@ nature. But I met just a tremendous range of very fascinating people from all levels of society. I mean people who would be very rich and would take me back to their house for a meal and the night, to people who had just got out of jail and were trying to find the person who had sent them to jail so, that they could knock him off, to nymphomaniacs, to all different kinds of -- of gays. One -- and -- and then -- the -- the gays I found immensely interesting. I -- that -- that's when I realized how -- how gentle most -- most gays were. But one guy who picked me up - I just have to mention this one hitchhiking story because it gives you an idea of the variation of -- of human belief systems [both chuckling] - he was 00:14:00a football player and -- and -- and a very large and very -- he probably weighed almost twice as much as I did at the time I weighed about 130 pounds. And as we were driving along -- we were in Tennessee he said to me, Well, he said, you know, you're lucky because I don't feel like -- you -- you're not appealing to me at the moment. I said, "I'm glad." [both chuckling] And he said, "you know, what I really want to do today is I want to stop and go into a peach orchard and feel the fuzz on the peaches." So, by God, pretty soon we stopped -- stopped the car -- of course, I was terrified that -- that actually he had something else in mind.

CLIGGETT: Uh-huh.

SCUDDER: On the contrary, we went into the orchard and he felt the fuzz on the peaches for about five or ten minutes and asked me to feel the fuzz on the peaches and I'd feel the fuzz and I agreed it was a nice experience and then we turned around and got back to the car and he took me another couple of hundred 00:15:00miles --

CLIGGETT: Where were you feeling fuzz, with your hands?

SCUDDER: Yeah, with your hands.

CLIGGETT: Just like -- like that?

SCUDDER: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you -- you know, these -- these -- these -- these -- and more often than not the people who'd pick you up on a long haul -- I mean some of the hauls would be a thousand miles --

CLIGGETT: Uhmhm.

SCUDDER: -- would be people who wanted company and knowing that they would never meet the hitchhiker again would be willing to tell you the story of their life, all of their problems and this and that and the other thing and then, you know, these -- these are fascinating.

CLIGGETT: Uhmhm.

SCUDDER: So, my guess is this has probably influenced my interest in -- in people.

CLIGGETT: Did you feel that in -- did you have an -- an innate ability to communicate with all of these people or did your ability to communicate improve over time with exposure to the diversity or were you just naturally good at talking at people very different than you?

SCUDDER: I think childhood is important to your -- because I was ostra -- not ostracized but people of my own age didn't want to play with me up at [Yoping] Hill at this -- this summer -- the summer commune. A couple of older people who 00:16:00were there in their twenties got interested in this little kid who was interesting in birding and one of them who was the son of -- of Henry Seidel Canby, Ed Canby, a musician took me under his arm and we would bicycle to -- to the movies in a place called Lakeville which was -- at night and then we would stop along the way to -- listen to night birds and I'd go walking to the swamp -- I remember that's when I saw my first Henslow's Sparrow because it was -- it was calling -- no-no, first long-bill marsh wren was calling at night in the swamp and we saw -- I asked Ed to come trudging off in the swamp with me so, he could find this --

CLIGGETT: Uh-huh.

SCUDDER: -- So, these -- the -- the older people and then the only people who were willing to play with me as children was the caretaker, Bert Blakey. He and his wife had three young sons, Tommy, Jimmy, and Jerry who I think were 00:17:00something like six, eight, and ten when I was, you know, three or four years older than they were and I spent a lot of time with them. Now, they would help me with dam building and what-have-you. So, I think just because of circumstances which -- which, you know, I had nothing to do with -- with creating I learned at a very early age to interact with people much younger than me -- not necessarily the people -- people my own age because of Exeter, you see, being -- being on -- active in these various extracurricular activities -- and I had good friends during -- down at Swarthmore who were my own age and with adults also, were interested in what I was interested in and So, -- and then So, this may have -- have helped with the -- the hitchhiking and things of this nature. Yeah, so, again, you know, these are -- these are sort of background 00:18:00experiences. So, now let's get back to Harvard.

CLIGGETT: The -- the hitchhiking had exposed you to a variety of people and So, maybe people hit the horizon as something interesting in addition to the natural world?

SCUDDER: Yeah. Yeah, see, what eventually happened was I realized that people were animals.

CLIGGETT: Uhmhm.

SCUDDER: I don't mean that in the negative sense, you know, where -- where we -- we belong to -- we're biological organisms involved in complicated social cultural systems and So, I just brought people into my -- my field of being a naturalist not just a naturalist working in the Amazon but a naturalist studying -- studying variations and uniformities in human society. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. At Harvard I primarily wanted to still become an ornithologist and -- and this was even after our marriage. So, for example, my 00:19:00sophomore year I was research assistant for John Peters who was the leading -- leading ornithologist of the time dealing with birds of the world. He was doing a huge nine-volume checklist of birds of the world and I was his research assistant working on the fourth floor of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, maybe the fifth floor. My job was to dust. You know, he -- he had huge, huge stacks of bird skins because in those days taxonomy and morphology of birds was -- was what ornithologists did. And they went off into the Amazon and they shot thousands of birds and then they skin them and brought them back and did measurements on them and work out the systemics, the taxonomy of -- of -- of birds. And so, I was his official duster and maybe this is what got me interested in Africa, I don't know because one of the -- the -- my -- my 00:20:00earliest -- my only memories of dusting birds for -- for Peters were dusting Bee-eaters--

CLIGGETT: Oh, whew

SCUDDER: -- African Bee-eaters --

CLIGGETT: Uh-huh.

SCUDDER: -- all these different kinds of beautiful Bee-eaters. But anyhow, Peters wanted me to -- he knew that I was interested in mountain climbing and that I was going up to the Selkirks [a mountain range in Washington state] that summer -- I think the summer of 19 -- 19 -- the summer of 1949 for -- for an expedition and so, he said, Well, why don't go out earlier and shoot Rosy Finches and Louisiana water thrushes for me? Well, of course, I didn't know how to skin birds and, So, we would lean out of windows, of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, with a BB gun and shoot pigeons and English sparrows and starlings and he taught me how to stuff them, so, I learned how to stuff these things. I can remember these -- you know, I don't know how we got these poor birds to come within range. I suppose he put out food for them but anyhow we nailed them, and he taught me how to stuff. Now, to shoot -- especially 00:21:00neotropical migrants especially in Canada you have to get permit from the British Columbia authorities, the BC Museum and he did get that for me and I got outfitted with a .410 shotgun and Molly and I and a friend, Pete [Aspinwall] headed out to the Selkirks, had these Rosy Finches right up at about nine -- eight, nine, ten thousand feet so, we had to go across the Columbia River and cut off through Devil's Club slowly getting up higher and higher until we established our series of camps and finally we got up to an area of Rosy Finches but just to see how good I was at skinning and whatever, I -- I decided I would just shoot something else. So, I shot one -- one Wilson's Warbler and skin it out and said, the hell with this. And so, that was the end of my career as an ornithologist. I -- I obviously realized that I much rather look at birds and 00:22:00study them as an amateur rather than become a professional. Of course [coughs] John Peters was not very happy as you can imagine.

CLIGGETT: Right.

SCUDDER: In fact, he sort of derogatively referred me of being interested in birds caught than in bird science -- he said bird caught going -- trying to beat your record so, to speak of seeing more birds.

CLIGGETT: Yeah.

SCUDDER: Okay, so, then I went to work for Mangelsdorf -- Paul Mangelsdorf. Now you see we're getting closer to anthropology because Mangelsdorf was at that time the leading scholar dealing with the phylogenetics of maize and he was studying the corn of little tiny cobs from Bat Cave in New Mexico. And, you know, he was looking into how maize came about and [coughs] his -- his theory was the highlands of Mexico, tripsacum and all these other kinds of varieties that -- that he thought were going into -- to the genetics of -- and the origins 00:23:00of maize.

CLIGGETT: So, he was an archaeologist at Harvard?

SCUDDER: No, he was a -- he was a botanist.

CLIGGETT: Okay.

SCUDDER: So, my job was to dust all these little cobs and then to measure and the cobs were about an inch and a half long and, of course, they'd been eaten. So, we just had the cobs and -- an I was measuring them and decided -- and I noticed there was a hell of a lot of dust falling out of them and I got more and more interested in what this dust was. So, then I began to analyze the dust and I realized it was fecal material that the -- and inhabitants of Bat Cave were using these little cobs as toilet paper -- when you think about it, you know, have a nice big cob of corn and you can eaten it and it's soft.

CLIGGETT: How old --

SCUDDER: Two thousand years old.

CLIGGETT: Okay, So, --about doing --

SCUDDER: -- maybe, I don't know probably -- probably -- no it could -- it 00:24:00couldn't be two thousand years old, but it was old, it was -- I mean it was over a thousand years old.

CLIGGETT: Okay.

SCUDDER: [coughs] They weren't coprolites but because the fecal material was on the -- on the cobs but it was used as toilet paper. So, I decided why don't -- I don't want to be an ethnobotanist. [Cliggett chuckling] So, that was my interesting end of my career in ethnobotany. And then I was taking courses in archaeology. [coughs] And I remember I took just about every course in archaeology that -- that Harvard gave us in undergraduate, all courses by Hal [Hallam L.] Movius on the Paleolithic but again my interest in the out-of-doors and people came in because Movius -- I think we talked him into it, he gave a course with contemporary gatherers and hunters to see what archaeologists could learn from -- in effect the settlement patterns and the production systems of 00:25:00hunters and gatherers. Let's turn this thing off for a moment and I want to get -- get and I have a little --

CLIGGETT: Okay, we're back.

SCUDDER: Yeah. I was -- I was -- I -- I'm very fond of Movius. In fact, Molly and I visited him with our two daughters at Les Eyzies in France when he was over there doing excavations when I was doing postdoctoral research at the London School of Economics we went over and spent a couple of days at -- at Les Eyzies. Anyhow, he was very interested in -- as was Desmond Clark in what archeologists could learn, especially archeologists dealing with the paleolithic, what they could learn from studies from contemporary hunter-gatherers. Okay, So, I didn't take many courses actually in cultural anthropology or social anthropology. In -- in fact, I don't think -- I can't 00:26:00remember any --

CLIGGETT: During your undergraduate?

SCUDDER: No. Gordon Wiley, for example, gave courses on Meso-America and on South America, I took those courses. I took courses in Physical Anthropology, [Earnest A.] Hooton's course, for example, in Physical Anthropology, a whole range of -- of -- of -- of courses in archeology and physical anthropology and virtually nothing in -- in social cultural. So, anyhow, So, I graduated from Harvard in 1952 in General Studies and mountaineering had now become more important really than -- than being a naturalist. As president of the Harvard Mountaineering Club you always have a number of job offers which [coughs] use your expertise as a mountaineer and -- and one of them was to start work for the 00:27:00Arctic Institute in North America and the Arctic Institute of North America at that time had a major research project on the border of Canada, the Yukon and Alaska where they were -- had a whole bunch of scientists doing work on glacial advance and retreat and what-have-you in the St. Elias Range -- St. Elias being -- Mount St. Elias being 18,000 and Mount Logan being 19,000 So, in other words these are the second and third -- largest peaks -- highest peaks in North American. But they needed a -- a mountaineer who was scientifically inclined to -- to handle the logistics and to keep the scientists from falling into crevasses and things of this nature. And so, they were willing to hire me for -- for that particular job but they wanted me to have more experience. So, it was suggested that I go to work for the Quartermaster Corps -- the Army 00:28:00Quartermaster Corps testing equipment. At that particular time, they had a -- the Climate Research Laboratory, it was in Lawrence, Mass close to the Merrimack River and, so, I went to work for the Climate Research Lab as a -- as -- again, my biological background pretty much as a physiological technician [coughs]. My job was to analyze expired air samples from GI's who were testing equipment under different kinds of climatic conditions. And they would come back in having Douglas bags full of their air and then I would have to analyze this for CO2 and this and that and the other thing. So, I was doing that kind of thing. But then they -- I sort of graduated up to more interesting things where in the winter they wanted to send you up to Fort Churchill, Manitoba, so, that you could -- 00:29:00environmental what they call dry cold conditions where it would be, you know, 30 degrees below zero without taking into consideration the wind chill factor.

CLIGGETT: Uhmhm.

SCUDDER: And so, I had a group of GI's that I would take out in -- under these conditions [coughs] and we camp out in tents on caribou skins with the hoarfrost in the morning tickling your nose coming down from the top of the tent. And then I hooked these poor characters up with thermocouples and put them in environmental clothing and they'd go hiking around in the outdoors and snow and then we took expired air samples from them and would analyze those and what-have-you. So, that would be in the winter months [inaudible]. Then, of course, where would they send us in the spring? Well, of course, in the spring they would send us to Mount Washington which would be wet cold with high wind. And So, I'd have these guys hiking up to the top of Mount Washington and going 00:30:00along up boot spur and across the ridge and on towards Mount -- Mount Washington and doing the same kind of work. And then where in the summer? Yuma, of course, then they sent us to Yuma in -- in the summer. So, Molly and I and -- and our -- el -- eldest daughter, Lydie was born by then, she was born in 1952, we went out to -- we drove out -- oh, because of the accident in Florida the insurance company of the oil company that -- the oil truck that had run into -- into us was worried, I guess, that I would sue them, I had no intention of suing them, I don't believe in suing. But they said, Well, if you sign off we'll give you hundred -- one thousand and five hundred bucks that you won't sue us. I said, Oh, sure, so, I signed it and -- and bought a little Chevr -- Chevrolet Coupe and that was the end of my hitchhiking --

CLIGGETT: Uh-huh.

SCUDDER: -- you see, but I was also, -- I was married too. Anyhow, Molly and I drove in this little Chevr -- Chevrolet Coupe out to [coughs] out to Yuma and 00:31:00so, we spent the summer doing the same kind of work there. Then the next place to go -- that was dry -- dry heat and then for -- for wet heat they would send us down to Puerto Rico. But before they did that the Arctic Institute said, Well, we're ready for you. And so, I resigned from the Quartermaster Corps - this is 1953 -- fall of 1953 - in readiness to -- to go to work for the Arctic Institute that fall. Well, unfortunately, my boss's wife and daughter were with him in the St. Elias Range and she was -- I guess she must've been about eighteen, she was supposed to be coming out in New York. They were a socially prominent family in New York.

CLIGGETT: She was the daughter?

SCUDDER: Yeah, the daughter.

CLIGGETT: Daughter.

SCUDDER: And so, [coughs] under not too good climatic conditions they flew out from base camp - they were using an Norseman aircraft with ski wheels - they flew out from base camp and the plane was never seen again. It either fell into 00:32:00a crevasse, there were stormy conditions, it was cloudy. The plane took off, they heard it recede into the -- into the background and that was that. Maybe the pilot got confused and ended up in the Pacific or maybe he crashed shortly into a crevasse or something of that nature, but I got a telephone call saying that well, Colonel Wood, he was the -- the head of -- I guess the head of the Arctic Institute at that particular time -- Arctic Institute of North America had been devastated by it and he was going to -- he just couldn't see going on with this particular project. And I think he -- he terminated it probably for about -- well, a number of years but so, I -- I no longer had a job. So, this is serendipity, you see. So, instead, you know, what to do?

CLIGGETT: So, this was verging on the beginning of the summer of '53 --

SCUDDER: Well no, this -- this was the fall, the early fal -- early fall of '53.

CLIGGETT: Okay.

SCUDDER: So, you know, what to do? Well -- oh yeah, another thing I was interested in Harvard was Primitive Religion. There was a wonderful professor there by the name of Arthur Darby Nock who taught primitive religion and he was in the Divinity School and also, had -- had an appointment I guess in Comparative Religion maybe at the graduate school of Arts and Sciences -- anyhow, he taught this course and I was fascinated by that and I was fascinated by religion not as a part -- practitioner of religion but just why was religion a cultural universal? So, somehow or other I ended up at Yale Divinity School.

CLIGGETT: How did you end up at Yale [chuckle] Divinity School?

SCUDDER: Well, I cannot remember.

CLIGGETT: In that fall of '53?

SCUDDER: The fall of '53 So, this must have all happened within a month or so, 00:34:00and frankly, I have no recall whatsoever of exactly how it happened, but I know why it happened. We had made a little bit of money during the year -- or almost a year that I was working for the Quartermaster Corps but not enough to afford going to graduate school and, of course, my grades at Harvard were not such that -- well, at -- NSF grants were available -- weren't available at that particular time.

CLIGGETT: Were not available, yeah.

SCUDDER: Well, So, you know -- it -- it was very difficult actually at that particular time for -- for students without -- my parents somehow or other paid for my -- well, I had a scholarship at Harvard as a freshman and I was a scholarship student before at Exeter waiting on tables and things of that nature and obviously when I was at Harvard my parents -- I think they were able to pay the tuition, but they couldn't pay anything more which is why Molly and I lived with various Harvard faculty both as undergraduates and graduates So, that we 00:35:00would have very cheap rent because we would be babysitting and -- and, you know, helping around the house with -- with faculty members. And then I had the job with Peters and the job with -- with Mangelsdorf and that kind of thing. So, Yale Divinity School gave me a full scholarship even though I told them I won't come in as a special student, I have no interest whatsoever in -- you know, doing the three-year course and what-have-you but I'm very interested -- I'm fascinated by religion and while I'm at Yale I want to take courses in Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism but while you were a student there you could also, take half your courses in the graduate school of Arts and Sciences. And So, I guess by that time Molly and I had decided, well, the Arctic maybe is not such a good career after all and So, somehow or other we decided that -- again, being interested in -- in -- in the out-of-doors and -- and in -- and 00:36:00interested in environments, Arctic -- okay, why not Africa. And So, I took two fantastic courses at -- at the Harvard -- at the Yale Graduate School. One was Harry [R.] Rudin's full-year course on the History of Africa and Harry Rudin had done -- I think his Ph.D. dissertation on Germans in the Cameroons, So, he was actually a researcher of Africa -- first researcher of Africa that I had ever met. And So, that was a full year course and then the other full-year course was a full-year course of Geography of Africa given by Karl [J.] Pelzer who was a professor of Geography and was a leading geographer dealing with the tropics. He had written -- was specially known for his books on South-east Asia for example. And so, those two courses were -- were -- well, that was half of my -- of my work at -- at Yale and that year -- that year probably was the most interesting 00:37:00year of -- of education that -- that -- that I had. It -- it was fascinating. It wasn't too good for Molly because as I said we didn't have very much money and so, we lived in West Haven which was a beach side community right at the edge of Long Island Sound where people don't live all year around, most of them they just have these summer cottages with no insulation and what-have-you --

CLIGGETT: Right.

SCUDDER: -- and so, it was cold and they -- they didn't have central heating rather they would just have these killer, I don't know what you call them but, you know, these things that you plug into the wall and what-have-you and the -- and the geyser for heating hot water but you had to turn it off within a half hour or it'd explode. And Molly identified a very good way to -- to -- to feed the family, these wonderful tuna fish casseroles --

CLIGGETT: Yes.

SCUDDER: -- and it was only years later that she told me that they were made out of cat food.

CLIGGETT: Pooh, whew

SCUDDER: Put cat food, you know, pure food -- Pure Food Act in the United States 00:38:00applies to cats and dogs too and then these casseroles were great. And so, you knew, we lived on cat food for -- for years and years. She only told me this a little bit later on. And jumbo lobsters because in those days eight or nine-pound jumbo lobsters had not become a gourmet kind of food. I mean people -- these, these are too big, and we only want to serve people 1-pound lobsters, 2-pound lobsters So, jumbo lobsters were very, very cheap and we would have lots and lots of jumbo lobsters.

CLIGGETT: Cat food and lobsters?

SCUDDER: Yeah, cat food and lobsters.

CLIGGETT: For a year?

SCUDDER: Well, no-no, this was for a number of years.

CLIGGETT: Through graduate school?

SCUDDER: Through graduate school. You can ask Molly about it. She says I -- I -- I am exaggerating how early it was but, you know, she definitely did make cat food casseroles, no -- no question -- no question about that.

CLIGGETT: [chuckle] These days, you know, in graduate school it's rice and beans but I'll -- I'll some of the graduate students know [chuckle] that there was a time that cat food --

SCUDDER: [chuckle] There was a time for cat -- [both laughing] Anyhow, so, the 00:39:00Yale -- the year -- at the end of the year at Yale then the question was, what to do? And one possibility was go -- Yale had one of the best graduate departments of geography at that time.

CLIGGETT: Uh-huh.

SCUDDER: I think the graduate departments of geography were becoming extinct. You know, Harvard had already eliminated its, only Derwent [S.] Whittlesey was left and again --

CLIGGETT: Harvard had eliminated Geography?

SCUDDER: Geography, yeah, as a -- as a -- as a -- as a field --

CLIGGETT: Right.

SCUDDER: -- for students. There was only one geographer, a tenured professor, a full professor [inaudible] Whittlesey who got -- Watson was up on the fourth of his floor, the Agassi Museum, I'll tell you about him later on. And the University of Michigan was about to eliminate I guess its School of Geography too although I'm not sure on the details on that. But anyhow for some reason I went and talked to the professors in the Yale School of Geography and -- and somehow or other they convinced me that it would not be a good career move.

CLIGGETT: Because departments were closing? [chuckle]

SCUDDER: Well, that could've been one of the reasons. I mean I -- I can't -- I can't remember the details too much. So, it seemed to me, well, let's go back to Harvard. And I guess all of these things had come together now to say, well, humans are pretty good interesting animals and they live in societies which makes them even more interesting and they have culture which makes them even more interesting So, what the hell, you know, let's -- let's study people. So, I came back to -- to Harvard in -- at Peabody. I remember now there were really two ways to get a Ph.D. in Anthropology at Harvard in those days. You could be in Social Relations where you get much more Sociology but there were still anthropologists in the faculty association of social relations or you could be in Peabody where you had to get the -- the conventional degree in physical anthropology, linguistics, archaeology, ethnography, and social -- social 00:41:00cultural anthropology.

CLIGGETT: So, Peabody was a four-field Americanist approach --

SCUDDER: That was the -- that was the classic --

CLIGGETT: -- and social Relations --

SCUDDER: -- yeah, classical -- classical field of anthropology.

CLIGGETT: -- and social Relations was more on British social anthropology level?

SCUDDER: Well, no, I wouldn't it was more on the British -- it was more -- Talcott Parsons --

CLIGGETT: Interesting.

SCUDDER: -- Merton, people of that nature. I mean, for example, Cliff Geertz who

was a classmate of mine at Harvard he was in Social Relations. I was -- and -- and totally different buildings.

CLIGGETT: Right.

SCUDDER: We called it Peabody because all of the offices and the faculty -- maybe a few -- well, there were a few joint appointments like Evan Vogt for example, who I guess maybe not had an office in Peabody, but the Peabody Museum had, of course, the collections --

CLIGGETT: Right.

SCUDDER: -- and what-have-you. So, most of the offices, people like Gordon Willey, Karl -- Pelzer was not actually -- no, not -- not Karl Pelzer uh, Gordon 00:42:00Willey, Hal Movius, people like that were all housed in the -- in the Peabody Museum. And the social anthropologists were people like Doug Oliver, Cora Dubois, and -- and -- and various others. And it was a good department. See, in the '50s Harvard probably was still the best depart -- Harvard Peabody was still probably the best Department of Social Anthropology -- Department of Anthropology in the country.

CLIGGETT: Uh-huh. When had division occurred at Harvard?

SCUDDER: Oh, I -- I don't know. It was there all the years that I was there and, you know, I was at Harvard for eleven years, four years as an undergraduate, six years as a graduate.

CLIGGETT: And that division was there were you were an undergraduate as well?

SCUDDER: Not that I know of because, you know --

CLIGGETT: You weren't [inaudible] --

SCUDDER: -- I wasn't -- I wasn't -- I wasn't aware of that kind of thing, but it was -- it was -- it was very well established when I came back to Harvard in the fall of 1950 -- '54 after this year at -- at Yale. Very quickly -- oh, and -- 00:43:00and now, another kind of serendipity comes along. The Danforth Foundation which was funded by money from Ralston Purina foods based -- it was based in St. Louis, Missouri -- the Danforth Foundation gave fellowships to people who were going to become either teachers of theology and religion in the universities or were actually going to become ordained in various denominations. But the -- the current head of it -- of the foundation, Kenneth Irvine Brown, decided that they might be interested to try an experiment of bringing in a few people who were interested in religion, the scientific study of religion. And So, three of us, all of whom became professors of Anthropology, none of whom, you know, taught 00:44:00Theology or -- or became ordained ministers, were elected as Danforth fellows in 1954 and -- and one of them is Irv [Irven] DeVore --

CLIGGETT: Uh-huh.

SCUDDER: -- who is professor of Anthropology at Harvard, you know, and did his classical work on baboons in -- in East Africa and -- and then subsequently worked among the pygmies and -- you know, other parts of Africa. Another was Robert Fernea who just recently retired as professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas in -- in Austin who certainly one of the leading American scholars of -- of Arabic studies in the Middle East. He'll come up later on --

CLIGGETT: That's right.

SCUDDER: -- he did his Ph.D. dissertation on Arabs in Southern Mesopotamia, he and his wife. His wife also, is -- is -- has done very fine books on Arabic women --

CLIGGETT: Right.

SCUDDER: -- in different countries in the Middle East, okay, Robert Fernea also, -- So, I had -- and -- and being a fellow -- Danforth fellows -- it was probably the best fellowship then available because they, in effect, paid you where we went. So, for example, subsequently when I went to fieldwork in Africa they continued paying Molly's expenses and by that time we had two children, two little girls. Alice was born in 1954. And so, it was a -- a fellowship which in effect took -- it lasted six years because you see I -- I went back to Harvard in '54 and got my Ph.D. in June of '60. Okay. They asked us to go to Minnewonka which was their sort of a summer camp on the shore of Lake Michigan where all of the Danforth fellows who were at that time were fellows would come during the 00:46:00summer. And then these were fascinating because it gave Bob and -- and Irv and myself a chance to, you know, again, to meet a tremendous variety of people and I think at that time too the -- the Danforth fellowship also, -- some of the fellows were -- were -- I think they -- they experimented also, bringing certain -- certain Muslims in too. So, that -- it -- it was -- it was quite fascinating. So, that -- that took care of the finances. We didn't really -- I didn't have to work -- well, no, I did -- I did a little bit of work because I was a teaching fellow at Harvard. So, back at Harvard -- uh, having decided that we really -- as a family we were going to be more interested in Africa than we were in -- in the Arctic and the Arctic -- Molly loves Alaska and we still go and take vacations in Alaska -- in fact, our last vacation was in the Pribilofs, these are tiny little islands between Siberia and -- and -- and Alaska and we went there because it's the largest community of Aleut -- Aleut Eskimo type in the 00:47:00United States but it's also, the largest population of fur seals in the United States and has fantastic birds. It's also, a very interesting place because it's the base for certain cannery companies and the cannery companies -- the workers on the cannery companies are Filipinos and people from South-east Asia. So, it's -- it's fascinating environment.

CLIGGETT: Right.

[End of Tape 1, Side 1]

[Begin of Tape 1, Side 2]

CLIGGETT: So, --

SCUDDER: So, how is it coming? Is it coming alright?

CLIGGETT: Yeah. It's fine.

SCUDDER: Okay. Well, is that -- that thing on, that damn thing on?

CLIGGETT: Yeah.

SCUDDER: Okay. Now, I -- I emphasize the Pribilof simply because, you see, you're going to see that my career is continuing to be a merger of the natural sciences, biology, ecology, and the social sciences not just anthropology, not just biology. There -- there is the interplay. Now this creates conflicts too as we will see because as a biologist or -- or one at least trained a lot in biology - I wouldn't call myself a biologist today - but because I'm interested 00:48:00in that I'm very concerned about loss of bio-diversity. I'm very concerned about the -- the incredible losses in bird life which are going on especially as they relate to the neo-tropical migrants but at the same time I'm very concerned about poverty and poverty alleviation.

CLIGGETT: I do want to explore poverty and poverty alleviation but -- because that's [inaudible] --

SCUDDER: So, I think what we'll do is we're going to go rapidly -- well, not so rapidly, but we'll go as fast as we can briefly through this history.

CLIGGETT: Well, we need to talk about what happened at Harvard and how you ended up --

SCUDDER: Yeah.

CLIGGETT: -- in Africa.

SCUDDER: And -- and then we can -- then we can go with the specific topics.

CLIGGETT: Okay, then I wanted to go to the section to poverty.

SCUDDER: Okay. So, at Harvard again serendipity comes in because there was no professor who -- no faculty who'd done any research in Africa and there was only one course taught on Africa and it was a good course. It was Doug Oliver's course on -- on Africa and -- and Oliver at that time, you know, he'd just come 00:49:00out with his monumental ethnography on the Sewai in the Pacific and was -- had a very interesting theoretical approach and I'd taken that course which I found fascinating. But that was it. But just at that particular time, W. O. Brown had started what was one of the first African studies programs at Boston University and at that program at that particular time was Elizabeth Colson and also, Phil Gulliver both who obviously played a very important role in my life. At Harvard the two people who had played the most important role in my life were Cora DuBois and Derwent Lockard. Cora DuBois had done the first probably very detailed research -- urban research in -- in India and Lockard was a -- he was a 00:50:00lecturer, I don't think he had done his Ph.D. because his field data had been torpedoed during World War II. I think and then sunk to the bottom of -- of -- of the ocean. Now anyhow, he was in the Center of Middle Eastern Studies and I was a teaching fellow in his course. But those were the two -- two people at Harvard, Cora DuBois because when I was preparing for my Generals she met with me one on one for quite a while.

CLIGGETT: Who was your adviser?

SCUDDER: Kluckhohn, Clyde Kluckhohn.

CLIGGETT: You don't mention him?

SCUDDER: No, and he -- Elizabeth Colson had been a research assistant of his and -- and -- and a junior colleague of his at one point in time. We'll get to Kluckhohn in a moment, later on. So, I went over to BU because, you know, 00:51:00serendipity is important but also, it's very important to -- to put yourself in the right place at the right time. You -- you have to go out and be a little bit entrepreneurial. So, I went over to BU to find out what was there and took Elizabeth Colson's course.

CLIGGETT: So, you were allowed at Harvard to take courses [inaudible]?

SCUDDER: Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah, you could -- yeah. Well, partly if you make a good argument -- I mean one has to make a good argument, you know, and it was very easy, well, you don't have courses in Africa how the hell am I going to become an Africanist if I cannot talk to people who've done research in Africa? So, that wasn't a problem. I got to know Phil very well as a friend -- Phil Gulliver --

CLIGGETT: Phil Gulliver?

SCUDDER: We played tennis together and that kind of thing. Elizabeth, of course, she was an associate professor at BU at that particular time. I didn't -- didn't get to know her too well then as a person but I was immensely impressed by her course on Central Africa which covered all the classical ethnologies that people 00:52:00from -- from British schools, social anthropology, had carried out in connection to The Rhodes-Livingstone Institute as well as her own research in one of the northern -- the Plateau Tonga. So, at the end of that year Colson told me - this is '56 --

CLIGGETT: So, the end of your second year --

SCUDDER: Oh, well, in June -- you know, the ac -- the end of the academic year.

CLIGGETT: So, the second year -- the end of the second year?

SCUDDER: The end of my second year and it is because I was a teaching fellow, I hadn't finished my course work and I hadn't taken any of my languages let alone my orals or my generals. So, in June or -- or -- yeah, I guess or maybe May of -- of '56 Elizabeth told me that she had been asked by the then director of the Rhodes-Livingston Institute in Northern Rhodesia, Henry Fosbrooke, geographer, that he had gotten money from the Northern Rhodesian mining companies to do a 00:53:00pre-relocation benchmark study of a population of tens of thousands of people who were going to soon be relocated in connection with the first main stream dam on the Zambezi, the Kariba Dam and that he wanted her to head up the team of two people because Elizabeth had already been the director of the -- of The Rhodes-Livingstone Institute in the '40s and had done research among the Plateau Tonga and had actually gone on safari down into the middle Zambezi Valley I think in 1948. So, Elizabeth knowing that I'd gotten to know the last geographer at Harvard, Derwent Whittlesey -- Derwood--I always get Derwent Lockard and Derwood Whittlesey. I get the names all screwed up --

CLIGGETT: Derwood?

SCUDDER: Well, I'm not sure, So, I'll say just Whittlesey and Lockard [chuckle] -- anyhow, Whittle -- Derwent -- I think it's -- yeah, I think it's Derwent -- Derwent Whittlesey and Daryll Wood Lockard [coughs] both of them had a big 00:54:00influence on me. I -- I'd gotten to know -- I'd looked up Whittlesey when I found out that -- I guess I must've gone when -- maybe even when I was dusting birds for Peters as an undergraduate I must've snooped around and anyhow, I found this geographer be -- you know, sort of in a dark room where -- where Harvard had relegated him because they couldn't fire him because he was a tenured professor. Now, by coincidence, he had done research on Southern Rhodesia. He'd written a fascinating article called the [inaudible] dealing with -- with Southern -- Southern Rhodesia and so, I spent a lot of time because of his interest in Africa, you know, talking with him. And I guess I mentioned him to Elizabeth Colson and she said, Well, of course you know Lockard, Henry Fosbrooke wants me to recruit in the states a geographer So, why don't you talk to Jo -- to Whittlesey to see if he could find someone and --

CLIGGETT: So, she asked you to talk to the geographer to ask him to find someone 00:55:00who could work with her --

SCUDDER: Well, to mention someone to work with her. She wasn't looking for him. Now, you have to ask her sometime why she didn't do some looking herself. Maybe she did.

CLIGGETT: Uh-huh.

SCUDDER: Anyhow, I guess I didn't look very hard --

CLIGGETT: Did you ever mention it to Lockw -- Lockwood -- Lock--

SCUDDER: To -- to Whittlesey?

CLIGGETT: Whittlesey.

SCUDDER: Probably but of course, you see he had no students, you know --

CLIGGETT: Right.

SCUDDER: -- and the department had been ended and then he was -- he was very close to retirement at that particular time So, I'm sure he wasn't aware of any young people or if he was I cannot remember that he mentioned them. So, I remember I went back to Elizabeth and said, Well, I'm not having much luck, what about me? And Elizabeth in classic fashion said, Humph, I didn't realize you were interested

CLIGGETT: [chuckle] In classic Elizabeth fashion.

SCUDDER: Yes, classic Elizabeth fashion. So, -- now, true to form I was in the process of applying to the Ford Foundation to study the Bakonjo of the Rwenzori, 00:56:00the only people that lived in the Mountains of the Moon, the Ruwenzori who goes up to 16,000 feet and heavily glaciated are the Bakonjo and the Bakonjo they even yodel, Yo-o-di, yo-o-do. I mean the Bakonjo were damn good yodelers and they'd stand on the ridge and yodeling back and forth and this and the other thing and So, you know, I wanted to study to Bakonjo, the Rwenzori. And where did I end up?

CLIGGETT: In a valley.

SCUDDER: In a rift valley -- not just in a valley but in a rift valley, in a semi-arid habitat, hot, disease ridden and what-have-you So, --

CLIGGETT: Okay.

SCUDDER: -- that's the beginning.

CLIGGETT: Well, So, Elizabeth said 'Humph and then --

SCUDDER: Well, So, then -- then -- then I was recruited and --

CLIGGETT: She -- she said, Humph and then said, well, okay?

SCUDDER: Yeah. Yeah, then okay and then So, you know, three months later --

CLIGGETT: You didn't have to work more to persuade her? She --

SCUDDER: No. No.

CLIGGETT: -- you -- you did not --

SCUDDER: No, no because I think I was -- I was probably the best student in her class --

CLIGGETT: I think, yeah.

SCUDDER: -- it might've been to BU after all [chuckle] but I was a Harvard student. So, -- no, I'd spent a lot of time with her -- I mean, you know, at -- 00:57:00at that particular time she knew that I was very, very interested in Africa and -- and had worked very hard in her course and had, you know, come over to BU and this and that and the other thing and I -- and I think I had done better in the course probably than any other students, I don't think there were more than two or three students in the class [chuckle] -- no, I think there were eight or nine. So, we left to go -- she -- Elizabeth likes going to meetings of the ASA, the Association of Social Anthropologists in England and -- and so, on the way --

CLIGGETT: So, this was about three months after --

SCUDDER: This was September -- September '56.

CLIGGETT: -- this was the fall [inaudible] --

SCUDDER: Oh, yeah, now in the meanwhile, of course, I went back to Harvard and told Kluckhohn that I was going to do this, and he was dead against it, dead set against it.

CLIGGETT: Because --

SCUDDER: He said this is not the way you do it-- I mean you haven't finished 00:58:00your course work let alone taken your languages or your --

CLIGGETT: Right.

SCUDDER: -- Generals and -- and, you know, you -- you just -- you're not ready to go out to the field. Well, I disagreed, and Elizabeth disagreed and whether Elizabeth talked to Kluckhohn I don't know, you see, because she had been formally his research associate. As a matter, she did her Ph.D. on the Makah Indians of the Northwest --

CLIGGETT: Right.

SCUDDER: -- and so, Kluckhohn's interest in the Navajo and her interest in the Makah somehow or other must have brought them together when she was at Radcliffe. So, Kluckhohn disapproved but obviously, you know, had no means for stopping me. I mean I had a fellowship from the Danforth Foundation and I was a student in good standing and so, off we went in September --

CLIGGETT: With -- with your adviser not supporting you?

SCUDDER: Yeah, but not -- but, you know -- you know, Kluckhohn was not the kind of person who would hold it against you --

CLIGGETT: Okay.

SCUDDER: -- I mean, you know, he wasn't going to -- he wasn't going to -- he said, No, I don't -- I don't -- I don't think it's a good idea. He was actually wrong because, of course, having done fieldwork when I came back I was in a much better position to finish my course work and to do my Generals. And I think I may have been [coughs] the first member of my class to graduate.

CLIGGETT: Whew

SCUDDER: But there -- there -- I think there were one or two people who graduated in 1960, I think Laura Nader and -- and a couple of others, probably about -- but we were certainly the first to graduate in terms of that year. I mean nobody graduated in '59 for example because in those days and I think it's still pretty much the case now -- you see, I became a graduate student at Harvard in '54 and one year in the field So, it was -- it was in effect five years -- Yeah. Yeah, because, you see, when I came back from the field -- I 01:00:00think that was one reason why Kluckhohn probably thought what he did, when I came back from the field I wouldn't be able to concentrate on writing my dissertation --

CLIGGETT: Right.

SCUDDER: -- I'd have to concentrate on finishing courses, taking languages, taking orals, take the Generals and writing a dissertation. So, he -- he -- he had a point. But it worked out -- it worked out well and -- and therefore I think he was wrong in my case, he might have been right in -- in other people's cases. Anyhow, on the way to Northern Rhodesia we stopped over in England to go to the ASA meetings in Oxford and that's I think when I decided perhaps - although maybe it only came up later - that I didn't want to ever be department -- part of a Department of Anthropology. British social anthropologists are just incredibly -- well, I would say cruel because at that particular time they were 01:01:00all dumping on Reo Fortune and I can remember that -- I guess he must've given some papers and they were li -- leaping on him about the paper and we all went off to a pub and they were continually ridiculing him and laughing about him at the pub and so, on. So, that was not --

CLIGGETT: And you hadn't seen that kind of critique and -- ever in your other academic experience? Never?

SCUDDER: No, no, because I -- you know, you -- you don't -- this was my first experience as a professional anthropologist to be in a meeting of professional anthropologists.

CLIGGETT: Uh-huh.

SCUDDER: You don't get this kind of -- of -- of -- remember, in England it's just social anthropology so, there is a smaller number of people, you don't really get this at the AAA meetings --

CLIGGETT: Right.

SCUDDER: -- you don't get this at the SfAA meeting either. They're much more congenial and -- and -- and areas for job hunts whereas these things are -- are -- you know, they're -- they're -- they're totally intellectual.

CLIGGETT: I think there are some of those small groups within the American Association, within any association the small groups that --

SCUDDER: Yeah, I expect So, and -- but certainly it was in departments --

CLIGGETT: Yes.

SCUDDER: -- I mean the reason of falling apart of various departments --

CLIGGETT: Yes.

SCUDDER: -- and -- and so, I -- I think probably that experience was one reason why -- and remember also, [coughs] being trained in the natural science in my early years - we're jumping ahead a little bit but when I came back from Africa in 1960 the only two job offers I was interested in were Cal Tech and MIT because I would there be in institutes of science in departments which --

CLIGGETT: Yeah.

SCUDDER: -- didn't have an anthropologist.

CLIGGETT: Or alternately they had multi-disciplinary conversations.

SCUDDER: Yeah, it wasn't that they didn't have anthropology -- well, we'll get to that later on. So, and then another important experience in England was that a student that Elizabeth Colson who was then helping was a student at Gray's Inn 01:03:00getting his law training, that was Mainza Chona, C-H-O-N-A Mainza, M-A-I-N-Z-A who subsequently became vice president of Zambia under the UNIP government and, of course, ambassador to China and -- and -- and what-have-you and -- and Elizabeth has been throughout almost sort of a grandmother to their -- to the Chona family, to Mainza and his wife, and Mainza's children and Mainza's grandchildren. Mainza recently died but he taught me my first words in Tonga and I remember that. And then -- then we went on to -- to Zambia or Northern Rhodesia and that was the beginning.

CLIGGETT: Okay. Do you want to take a little break from it?

SCUDDER: No.

CLIGGETT: [chuckle] Okay. Well, so, clearly the -- the Gwembe project and that experience with Elizabeth in the field was a pretty formative time So, I'd like 01:04:00to talk a little bit about -- the Gwembe project or do you want to finish up education?

SCUDDER: No, no, no, no -- let's historically go -- go forward because this is a [inaudible] thing.

CLIGGETT: Talk a little bit about what it was like to work with Elizabeth and what that first fieldwork was like and how that kind of shaped your --

SCUDDER: Well, I -- I consider Elizabeth probably one of the top -- not probably, definitely one of the top five social cultural anthropologists in the world today So, of course, I was incredibly fortunate to have the opportunity to work with her. And I'll give you an idea of the kind of person that she was. Henry Fosbrooke whom I'm very fond of -- whom I became very fond of, he and his wife, Jane, was pretty much intending that the geographer that Elizabeth would recruit would be under Henry's thumb and Henry being, you know, a former 01:05:00District of Columbia and Masai Land --

CLIGGETT: District commissioner?

SCUDDER: District commissioner. What did I say?

CLIGGETT: Columbia.

SCUDDER: Oo-la, no district -- district commissioner in Masai Land and head of the Ngorongoro crater and things of that nature, you know, was a pretty top down person and I have a wonderful vision of Henry -- he didn't actually have a sjambok [a kind of whip, made of rhinoceros hide or plastic] but -- but symbolically he might have, standing up behind a number of Africans crawling along on their hands pulling out crabgrass in the lawn and, you know, this -- this was -- this was colonial -- colonial northern Rhodesia and Henry was a wonderful person and -- and -- and -- and had -- had many, many close friends and what-have-you but he had -- also, had a huge black dog called Puppy , it must've weighted a hundred pounds and -- and was eventually poisoned by an African who was scared of him. Anyhow, Henry, you know, had many good ideas of 01:06:00-- of what he wanted me to do and -- and I think was pretty much inclined to -- to treat me sort of as his research assistant.

CLIGGETT: But he wasn't going to be based in the field --

SCUDDER: No. No, he was going to be --

CLIGGETT: -- you would be his research assistant doing his tasks.

SCUDDER: But Elizabeth very quickly educated Henry and I can remember now, Elizabeth frequently when she is about to make a pronouncement will start off by saying, Look, and then I think she went out to say," Look, Ted is my colleague," she emphasized colleague, and we are here to do the research as co-colleagues and he will decide what he feels is important. Of course, we're -- we'll be coming up to the Institute fairly frequently and we'll be talking with you and with the other anthropologists trying get ideas and participating in the life of the Institute and that kind of thing but he's my colleague and we're working together. So, she made that very clear from the very beginning. The first couple 01:07:00of -- of weeks -- I think anthropologists working in different -- in different field conditions probably have two kinds of reactions. One is, oh my God what am I doing during the first ten days; and the other is, the excitement of the first ten days is such but it wears off after about three months and you say, my God I got to stay on for another nine months collecting a lot of stuff which is boring but other stuff which is interesting. It's not culture shock -- well, the first ten days can be culture shock. The -- if it happens after about three or four months you just realize, my God you got to -- it's not fun anymore -- you know, it is fun, but it is not fun. Well, Elizabeth and I we only had one vehicle to start with and, So, we moved into a village called Sinafwala which is the village that you've been concentrating on also, but [Sinafwala] at that particular time was not on the Zambezi. It was located inland on a little river 01:08:00called the Chezia, it was a big village. Elizabeth wanted to move right into the village but on the edge of it and, So, we ended up with two tents side by side in the same village with Elizabeth -- and this was in the dry season, September-October which as you know are the hottest months of the year, with Elizabeth automatically starting off speaking Tonga and getting right down to fieldwork.

CLIGGETT: Uh-huh.

SCUDDER: And here I am having never been outside the United States in my life except hitchhiking to Canada --

CLIGGETT: Whew.

SCUDDER: -- and as a little boy -- my father had a Fulbright at one time and he was writing a book and he took the family to Bermuda, but I was only seven at that time, I don't remember that too much. So, you know, and with enough background in biology to be terrified of things like schistosomiasis --

CLIGGETT: Yes.

SCUDDER: -- and told that the only way to kill the Schistosome in your bath 01:09:00water was to put copper sulfate crystals into it.

CLIGGETT: What is that?

SCUDDER: Copper sulfate is -- is --

CLIGGETT: Oh, copper sulfate,

SCUDDER: -- you know, these -- these blue crystals --

CLIGGETT: Uh-huh.

SCUDDER: -- and of course, I put too much into my water and it turned blue --

CLIGGETT: [chuckle] And did you turn blue?

SCUDDER: Well, yes, a little bit. [both chuckling] So, you know, So, I -- I was being impacted, one, upon by being out of the US -- of course, the hitchhiking had -- had prepared me for being on my own So, it wasn't -- and -- and mountain climbing had prepared me for being on my own, but it was hotter than hell and I wasn't used to -- to deserts except for Yuma.

CLIGGETT: You -- you wanted to go to the mountains --

SCUDDER: Yeah, I'd wanted to go to the mountains --

CLIGGETT: -- The Arctic Institute --

SCUDDER: -- and -- and Elizabeth was getting on with the work, So, I was very well aware of how little I knew and so, on. And so, I can remember on the tenth day wandering off in the -- in the shimmering heat, you know, along one of those little paths going out of the village with everything dead and dying on the sides of the path and the temperature was over a hundred degrees Fahrenheit and 01:10:00rising --

CLIGGETT: Right.

SCUDDER: -- and saying, you know, this is not for me. And I remember coming back to Elizabeth and saying, hey, you know, I'm not too sure that this is going to work out and that I've going to -- that I made the right decision.

CLIGGETT: Uh-huh.

SCUDDER: And she said, Well, you just going to have to decide, aren't you? [both chuckling] So, about a week later Henry Fosbrooke said that my Land Rover was ready.

CLIGGETT: Ah.

SCUDDER: My Land Rover was --

CLIGGETT: Did you know that you were going to get a vehicle of your own initially --

SCUDDER: Yeah. Yeah.

CLIGGETT: -- that was the plan?

SCUDDER: Yeah, we were both hired as -- Elizabeth obviously as a senior research fellow and myself as a research fellow so, we were both on salaries and the understanding was that we would be in separate villages --

CLIGGETT: I see, and separate vehicles.

SCUDDER: -- and we have our own vehicles and we have our own camping equipment but only one vehicle was ready So, that I had to start off in effect in this huge big village with Elizabeth already right in the middle of it. So, as soon 01:11:00as I got my own vehicle then I picked a smaller village which was on the edge of the Zambezi, So, I could see the Zambezi --

CLIGGETT: Uh-huh.

SCUDDER: -- that the village was surrounded by, you know, beautiful bio-diversity --

CLIGGETT: Uh-huh.

SCUDDER: -- it was a village of 126 people whereas Elizabeth's must have been over a 500 hundred. In fact, her -- there were two big villages, Madonda and Sinafwala village were side by side.

CLIGGETT: Right.

SCUDDER: In fact, you couldn't really tell where one began and the other ended --

CLIGGETT: Right.

SCUDDER: -- or you pretty much had to be told whereas Mazulu village was not just nucleated but it was strung out. Half of the village was on one side of a beautiful Indian tamarind tree and the other half of the village was on the other side --

CLIGGETT: Uh-huh.

SCUDDER: -- and so, I put my tent up under the Indian tamarind tree.

CLIGGETT: Uh-huh.

SCUDDER: I didn't realize at the time that that was the dancing ground or on moonlight nights both for people and scorpions --

CLIGGETT: Yeah. That's right.

SCUDDER: -- and snakes and what-have-you that would come out of the holes of the tamarind.

CLIGGETT: How did you decide of that village? Did that occur in conversation with Elizabeth about where you would go and the kinds of work that you planned on doing or was it purely your own independent choice of how to survive?

SCUDDER: Well, my own independent choice but it was the closest village to Sinafwala --

CLIGGETT: Uh-huh.

SCUDDER: -- and it was very important -- Elizabeth's methodology -- this was a methodology that -- that she had developed and -- and a fieldwork procedure which I still follow, she had a very systematic way of taking notes which you know, and every day when it would get hot around -- after lunch, you know, she would get out a little typewriter and I still have my old Olympia typewriter and she would type --

CLIGGETT: [inaudible] It should be given to the Smithsonian at some point.

SCUDDER: Yeah. That's right. Yeah, along with myself. [both chuckling] She would get out her little typewriter and I would get out my little typewriter and we'd sit at tables and we'd type up notes --

CLIGGETT: Uh-huh.

SCUDDER: -- for about -- and I -- I followed her -- her -- her note taking procedure and still do --

CLIGGETT: And I do as well.

SCUDDER: -- we would -- well, you know, her system is -- is an excellent system and we would type them in triplicate --

CLIGGETT: Uh-huh.

SCUDDER: -- So, I would get one copy of everything that she did and -- and -- and then there would be one copy for the -- which we would give to the Institute. And then we've continued -- well, I don't think we give one copy to the Institute anymore, but we continue doing our -- our field notes in -- making them available non -- not just not duplicate but make -- make available to all research members of the team whoever they may be.

CLIGGETT: Uhmhm.

SCUDDER: So, I would follow her procedure, but we would want to get together either once a week or at least once a fortnight and that could mean being close together and also, from the point of view of going up to the plateau periodically to resupply. We would combine forces for that.

CLIGGETT: So, how far apart were Mazulu and Sinafwala at that time?

SCUDDER: It couldn't have been more than two miles.

CLIGGETT: So, would you walk or drive back and forth?

SCUDDER: Both. Both because when I was mapping gardens frequently the gardens of Mazulu especially the ones in the bush would be adjacent to the gardens of Sinafwala and then I would walk into Sinafwala and say hello to Elizabeth. But no, most of the time we'd drive and forth, So, it must've probably been closer to -- to two miles, yeah --

CLIGGETT: Uh-huh.

SCUDDER: -- because it was in a different [inaudible], it was in a different neighborhood. Sinafwala was in Chezia and Mazulu was in Miyaka which included Chisamu, Siamalo, and -- and Madonda --

CLIGGETT: Right.

SCUDDER: Okay. So, and also, -- yeah, oh yes -- yeah, that's right, it was also, to a certain extent determined by the district commissioner. The district commissioner, of course, was responsible for the resettlement of 37,000 people --

CLIGGETT: On the Zambian side?

SCUDDER: -- on the Zambian side and he didn't want to be bugged, you know, by two anthropologists getting in trouble. So, he did say, I don't want you on the other side of the Chezia River or on the other side of the Chibuwe River. Now see there was just one road then which had been opened up in 1948 which went down to a mission --

CLIGGETT: To Chabbo Boma Mission?

SCUDDER: Chabbo Boma Mission and then that road turned and eventually went across the Chibuwe River to Chief Chipepo's villages and then the other direction would -- would going up to Zambezi would go through the Chezia River. So, to a large extent the district commissioners in effect told us we had to have -- we had to be in villages between these two rivers.

CLIGGETT: For fear that the rivers would come up and --

SCUDDER: And flood --

CLIGGETT: -- you wouldn't be able to get out?

SCUDDER: -- and we couldn't get out and so, we'd come down with malaria and then the government would've to run a rescue operation and so, on. So, Elizabeth then had picked the -- the biggest two villages --

CLIGGETT: Sinafwala and Madonda.

SCUDDER: -- Sinafwala because she was wanting to concentrate on social organization and kinship.

CLIGGETT: Uh-huh.

SCUDDER: And meanwhile the closest village that would enable me to stay in contact with her but would be small enough for me to measure all the gardens and that was probably the reason for not taking Chisamu or Mazona. As it was it took me -- take -- three to six months to measure all the gardens and if I had picked a village twice as big --

CLIGGETT: And was that focus determined by Fosbrooke in hiring you that you were going to do ecology and gardens and livelihood?

SCUDDER: No. No, that was -- that was --

CLIGGETT: That was your own interest in that --

SCUDDER: Well, that -- that was -- that was decided between Elizabeth and I. If Fosbrooke had decided it, he probably would have targeted me more specifically whereas Elizabeth wanted me to take notes on everything.

CLIGGETT: Uh-huh.

SCUDDER: She said, anything of, you know, or relevance to anthropology you write 01:17:00up. So, for example, with the first couple of weeks or maybe it was the first month or So, one of the eldest of the village [Leis] died and So, I spent the next few days [telephone ringing], you know, at his funeral --

CLIGGETT: Stop for a minute. Okay.

SCUDDER: So, I spent the next few days at [Leis] funeral and I brought up very detailed notes on the funeral. But we had a division of labor. Elizabeth was going to concentrate on kinship, social organization in general, political organization, the legal system. I was going to concentrate on the production system, which would mean very detailed study of agriculture, gathering, hunting, fishing, general relationship with people to their environment. Also, she was going to concentrate on very detailed studies of - we hadn't decided at that time on the number of villages - of the small number of villages whereas I was 01:18:00going to be responsible for covering the whole middle Zambezi Valley -- now, and obviously that was exactly what I wanted to do.

CLIGGETT: When and how did you have those conversations? Early on or as the pro -- as your time there --

SCUDDER: Pretty early on. Yeah, pretty much early on. Pretty much -- but remember she'd already been in the area. She knew its geographical extent. We knew that the -- the Zambezi -- you see, you had the -- 57,000 people were going to be relocated, probably two thirds of them were on the northern Rhodesian side, one third on the Southern Rhodesian side. The Zambezi was not a barrier. Tonga would go back and forth by dug-out canoe, they would marry from people the other side, they would have gardens on the other side, So, it was very clear that I would have to -- in dealing with the -- the human ecology and remember my Ph.D. dissertation and my first book was The Ecology of the Gwembe Tonga.

CLIGGETT: Right, but as you went into your research you didn't necessarily know 01:19:00that that was going to be the book that you write.

SCUDDER: Oh yeah. Oh yeah.

CLIGGETT: You -- really?

SCUDDER: Sure, a combination of biology and anthropology, sure. Yeah, I mean that's -- that's -- that's -- well, I'm sure we talked about this -- we must have talked about this as early as -- as May and June of '56 and we certainly talked about it on the plane going over and talked about it --

CLIGGETT: As it being your dissertation project and the --

SCUDDER: Oh sure. Oh sure. I mean I took this job with Elizabeth for my Ph.D. dissertation and my Ph.D. dissertation was going to be in what I was interested in --

CLIGGETT: I see.

SCUDDER: -- which was in effect the ecology of Gwembe Tonga which would be a combination -- see, I collected all the various food plants that they ate and had them identified, collected the fish, went hunting with the Tonga, all of these kinds of things So, that I could come up with a generalized -- but my responsibility also - and this was again it came from our early conversations - 01:20:00was - and -- and Henry I'm sure had an input on this too being a geographer - we were not doing a classical community study. We purposely tried to pick a number of villages that were going to be resettled and at least one village that wouldn't --

CLIGGETT: Right.

SCUDDER: -- a control village. And since we were dealing with a population of 57,000 people who were going to be resettled we needed to know the whole area in which they lived. So, I spent a lot of time touring.

CLIGGETT: Okay, a minute ago you said 37,000 and now you just said 50,000 -- 57,000 people?

SCUDDER: Yeah, 57,000 is the total on both Northern Rhodesia and Southern Rhodesia.

CLIGGETT: Oh, okay.

SCUDDER: Or actually it was -- let me see now, it was -- I think it was 34 and 23 [coughs], it wasn't 37,000, it was 34,000 on the northern Rhodesian side and 23 on the Southern Rhodesian side. So, with my new Land Rover I quickly took the rims -- took the roof off, put the windscreen down, got one of the little -- 01:21:00those hats that --

CLIGGETT: A pith helmet? [chuckle]

SCUDDER: God no, that -- that the -- the young Wags, you know, the young white colonial officers in the bush, not -- not the provincial administration type but the agricultural types and what-have-you, the fisheries and wildlife types would wear, you know, you -- a little hat where you --

CLIGGETT: Put up on side --

SCUDDER: -- one side is -- is -- is buttoned up and wearing very short shorts and -- and spats, you know, So, snakes wouldn't bite you as you were trudging through the bush and all that kind of thing and I got a shotgun and, so, I would shoot birds over my windscreen for -- for the pot, you know, this -- this was colonial anthropology. Alright. So, Elizabeth and I formed a very, very close team and -- and we still are a very, very close team. Initially we wrote 01:22:00separate books, now increasingly we give the other person the option of being a co-author of an article or of a book. We've also, agreed that we're never going to say, who collected this particular data? The data which is available is available for any member of the study team -- they have the option to give credit to the study team and -- and say that this is data which has been collected and what-have-you, but one doesn't come up with saying, well, so, and so, -- this was so-and-so's first idea, they first thought of this and we're going to -- I'm going to write it up. You write up what you're interested in using the database.

CLIGGETT: When did you work that -- those things of arrangements out? How did that occur?

SCUDDER: Well, that probably didn't occur until after we came back from the field the first time because we weren't writing anything up. Whether we discussed that -- you know, we had to give papers I suppose, I cannot remember, 01:23:00but part of being a -- a research fellow of the Institute would mean that occasionally the Institute fellows would get together and give papers and stuff. Whether or not we gave papers that first year I cannot remember so, I'm not sure -- any more than we are exactly sure when we decided to turn the study into a long-term study although we have both different impressions.

CLIGGETT: A lot of people ask that question when did you start the projects and the anticipation of it being a long-term study?

SCUDDER: No. No, no, we did not. Henry, fortunately, had gotten money for a before and after study. He had gotten enough money from the copper companies to do a study just before resettlement and then a few years after resettlement and that was it. I mean there was no money and no intention So, at some point between 1962 --

CLIGGETT: When you went back for the after study?

SCUDDER: Yeah -- and 1967 we decided to turn it to be a long-term study. And I think -- and that's where we -- we -- we -- we have slightly different impressions, but I think we will both agree that the Zambia independence coming along in '64. So, in other words, I think by '64 we had realized, hey, we got a one-year pre-location - notice -- notice, I never say baseline study --

CLIGGETT: Right.

SCUDDER: -- because I see as Elizabeth does, a social-cultural system is dynamic open-ended coping system which are always open to change but con -- change and continuity are both very important aspects of it. So, we had had -- pre-resettlement benchmark study and then a post resettlement how-are-they-doing? And we knew that --

CLIGGETT: And the years of that post resettlement --

SCUDDER: -- the post was '62-'63 --

CLIGGETT: Okay.

SCUDDER: -- and they were -- primarily we settled in -- well, the resettlement was over by '58. We should of course -- if we had known more about resettlement 01:25:00at that time -- Elizabeth did go back briefly in '60, very briefly, but if we had known now -- we had known then what we know now we should have been there during the resettlement process and we should have been shortly after the resettlement but -- so, some time before Zambia Independence in '64, so, -- after -- after we'd done the benchmark study -- we certainly had not agreed to turn it into a long-term study before we did the re-study. But after we did the re-study in '62-'63 So, some time in '63-'64 we decided to turn it a long-term study.

CLIGGETT: During the re-study -- during the '62-'63 period did you -- what kinds of things did you see? What kinds of things were you learning? What -- what did you absorb of that experience that would have led to you thinking about looking 01:26:00at it --

SCUDDER: As a long-term study?

CLIGGETT: -- a long-term study? Yeah.

SCUDDER: I think increasing awareness of the dynamics of -- of the behavior of individuals as actors within communities in response to different opportunities internal and external. For example, at the very beginning of the study it was rather amazing to us that we were welcomed in '56-'57 by -- by people who were about to be forcible relocated. You know, and since we were driving vehicles which had Rhodes-Livingstone Institute on them it was clear to the people that we weren't missionaries or -- or traders we were -- we were -- if not government personnel people who were very closely associated with the government.

CLIGGETT: Uh-huh.

SCUDDER: And yet there was no hostility at all ever. We never had any hostility. 01:27:00I mean there are always individuals at any society who suck up to you, other individuals who -- who like you for what you are and -- and are very cooperative, and other individuals who don't like you at all --

CLIGGETT: Uhmhm.

SCUDDER: -- and always gruff and grumpy and what-have-you with you although even they as time goes on which is one of the benefits of a long-term study, realize as Elizabeth has said on a number of occasions that very well, this -- this guy may be a son of a bitch but -- but old Scudder has been with us through thick and thin and he's aware of the various problems that we had in time and so, you know, I'll keep talking to him. So, I've never found anybody who's been unwilling to talk to us. But I know that there -- that the Tonga as individuals, you know, vary in their reactions to us. But the reactions were never negative. Well --

CLIGGETT: Even when you went back in '62-'63?

SCUDDER: No, no, no, no, I'm sure there are people -- you know, Jon Habard is convinced that there were people who wanted to sorcerize us or at least 01:28:00sorcerize me and that's possible but -- in fact, on one occasion -- one guy was taking my flesh out of my -- my arm with his fingernails and trying to pull some flesh out -- you know, he might have something not particularly nice in mind.

CLIGGETT: That was [inaudible]?

SCUDDER: Yeah, [inaudible]. So, we realized by when we went back in '62 that there was denial, that they didn't believe they were going to be relocated, that -- and then, of course, when we got to know more and more about forced relocation we found that this was a very common pattern. Janice Pearlman has come up with the same kind of work with her -- her research in favelas in Brazil, the government is going to do an urban redevelopment project -- well, you know, it takes about ten or fifteen years before it actually gets going and -- and people -- now, in effect, if they realize that fifteen years before it 01:29:00happens -- and planning for Kariba, for example, the actually planning goes fairly quickly but for most big dams planning starts at least ten years --

CLIGGETT: Right.

SCUDDER: -- before people are moved. Well, if people really took -- took it seriously they'd be under stress anticipating this move for ten years --

CLIGGETT: Uhmhm.

SCUDDER: -- So, denial is a very affective stress reduction mechanism, we just get on our lives -- with our lives. And so, even the headman of Mazulu who had been taken down to see the map built himself a new homestead with considerable effort on the other side of the little track which went by the village --

CLIGGETT: Whew.

SCUDDER: -- the village is now expanding -- it's expanding out. So, you know, and -- and then in the re-study in '62-'63 we were -- we became aware at that time of the multidimensional stress of resettlement, increase mortality and morbidity although hard to document because there weren't benchmark studies of -- epidemiological studies before relocation but it was very clear that certain 01:30:00death rates had gone up as a result of resettlement or at least from a theoretical point of view. We were very much aware of the anxiety that women had in leaving gardens inherited through many generations from -- through the maternal line. We were very much aware of -- by '62-'63 that there were quite a few losers, that is the sikatongo, the neighborhood ritual leaders, to a certain extent their ritual is tied to particular ritual sites, malende sites, basangu, all of these various ritual officials were getting their -- their influence to a certain extent from long-term residence of them and their ancestors in a particular area and associated with a particular shrine associated with a particular spot. Alright. So, that was social-cultural stress so, all of this 01:31:00stress, physiological, psychological, also, anxiety about the future - another psychological aspect - how in the world are all these things going to work their way out? because we saw the people were beginning to -- just beginning to get back up on their feet. Now, they are beginning to feel at home in the new habitat, to give names to the little tributaries and to land forms in the area and get familiar with the vegetation especially in the Lusitu which we'll get to later on which is a totally different area --

CLIGGETT: Right.

SCUDDER: So, we wanted to know what -- what was going to happen. The -- the first couple of years were disastrous and --

CLIGGETT: Were you discovering this -- these various ways that people were experiencing stress, psychologically, physio -- physiologically, socio-culturally while you were in the field or was it after you collected the data and you left and you started processing and -- and analyzing and -- and -- 01:32:00and getting ready to write or was it clear --

SCUDDER: Oh, why -- well, some -- some of these things were clear in the field. I mean, for example, in the field how could you miss that the neighborhood ritual leaders in the Lusitu had not been able to reestablish shrines? You see, this kind of thing -- now, the Lusitu particularly is of interest -- alright, I suppose I have to define that a little bit. When people were asked -- and the -- and the British colonial officials were a very dedicated bunch. They didn't have any experience with resettlement --

CLIGGETT: Uh-huh.

SCUDDER: -- they didn't really have enough staff, but they were dedicated, and they wanted to do a good job.

CLIGGETT: At what?

SCUDDER: At resettlement.

CLIGGETT: Good job for the people? Good job --

SCUDDER: Good job for the people. One of them, Alex Smith had a very serious nervous breakdown, I don't know if he ever recovered from it --

CLIGGETT: Whew.

SCUDDER: -- because of the -- of the pressure of -- of the -- the ch -- see, he was the district officer in charge of the area when the -- the Chezia War broke 01:33:00out --

CLIGGETT: Uh-huh.

SCUDDER: -- and in charge of the -- moving those people to -- to the Lusitu --

CLIGGETT: And he had a nervous breakdown as a result of his feelings about the disruption --

SCUDDER: Well, you know, a nervous breakdown I think around 1960 -- in the early 1960s and he may never have recovered, I don't know -- I don't know what happened to him actually. But no-no, these -- these people took it very seriously. But they were the minority, they were the provincial administration people who were responsible -- you see, the resettlement of -- Kariba was a World Bank funded project and it was the largest loan that the World Bank had given in Africa up until that time. It was the first main stream dam, a big one, that the World Bank had funded in Africa. In those days the World Bank had no guidelines as to how resettlement should be carried out. Resettlement was considered strictly the responsibility of the sovereign nation.

CLIGGETT: Had the World Bank funded other big dams anywhere else?

SCUDDER: I don't think so, I don't think so.

CLIGGETT: It was -- So, Kariba was the first big World Bank --

SCUDDER: Yeah, it was the first big one and so, nobody had a clue really what would -- in the tropics, what would be the environmental and -- and -- and socio-cultural impacts of this?

CLIGGETT: And the World Bank wasn't funding the research?

SCUDDER: No.

CLIGGETT: They were just funding the dam, this was [inaudible].

SCUDDER: They were just -- well, and -- and even today I've just -- did -- reading a manuscript that -- that a -- a scholar sent me who is writing about the World Bank guidelines and -- and how the World Bank is coming up with better and better guidelines on people and environment and what-have -you, indigenous people --

[End of Tape 1, Side 2]

[Begin of Tape 2, Side 1]

CLIGGETT: -- one from May --

SCUDDER: Of Tape Number One?

CLIGGETT: -- Tape Number One -- May 20th, Tuesday, Cal Tech, Pasadena, interview with Thayer Scudder by Lisa Cliggett talking about the World -- the World Bank's in dams and research --

SCUDDER: And this is Tape 3, right?

CLIGGETT: No, this is -- this is Tape 2, Side 3 basically.

SCUDDER: Okay, 2, Side 3 -- okay, I had different sides, yeah, yeah, you're 01:35:00right. Anyhow, Avo -- [Avoson] has written in this very interesting article on the World Bank called The World Bank Safety Net [inaudible] and he said, you know, you ought to also, look into the question of even though the World Bank has all these safety net guidelines of dealing with the environment, yes, but dealing with resettlement and indigenous people why does the World Bank fund so few resettlement and indigenous people components for dam projects? There have only been a few. There are lots of environmental components that the World Bank funds, but it still doesn't fund much dealing with resettlement. So, you can ask the question, is this to a certain extent that they're concerned about adverse criticism of their resettlement record by human rights and environmental NGO's and so, they have come up with these safeguards, but they still won't fund the actual implementation. They will give them technical assistance money but anyhow 01:36:00that -- that -- that's another side. But this was a World Bank project and resettlement was pretty much left in the hands of, God forbid, of the white settlers in southern Rhodesia because they -- you know, it was a self-governing -- a self-governing conol -- colony. And who is the self-governors? White, white, white settlers. So, they were responsible for the relocation of the 23,000 on the south bank and they had, in effect, a total different policy than on the north bank. Their -- their job was just to physically remove the people and then -- and then forget about them to a large extent, get them out of the way -- they were people in the way whereas on the Northern Rhodesia side there was genuine concern about creating opportunities, fisheries and things -- agriculture for them after they were moved. Now, and the -- the district commissioner and his staff asked all the Gwembe villagers where do you want to move? And -- and in what units? And this was really quite -- if -- if you look 01:37:00at what they were doing in the '50s many of their policies were state of the art. They allowed the people to participate to the extent of identifying where they wanted to go. They allowed the people to participate by extending what were the units that they wanted to be resettled in. And they -- most of them followed them-- all of them said they wanted to be resettled not just as a village unit but as a neighborhood unit consisting, let's say, three to seven villages. Well, then right in the middle of the construction the Federal Power Board which was responsible for building the dam decided to heighten it. They decided to heighten the dam --

CLIGGETT: Right.

SCUDDER: -- and what that meant was that a number -- oh, what I didn't say was that the people had all said, we want to move up the tributaries on which we're currently settled --

CLIGGETT: Yeah.

SCUDDER: -- for -- on around the deltas of which we're currently settled.

CLIGGETT: Uhmhm.

SCUDDER: So, the people who lived along the Chezia River or in the Chezia Delta wanted to move up the Chezia. Those who were on the Chibuwe wanted to move up to 01:38:00Chibuwe. Those on the [Chilolo] wanted to move up to [Chilolo]. Well, when the dam was heightened many of the resettlement area which were already being prepared were going to be flooded.

CLIGGETT: And Mazulu was supposed to be --

SCUDDER: Mazulu was going to move up the Chezia.

CLIGGETT: Musulumba was the one that wasn't supposed to move?

SCUDDER: Musulumba was to be the control village.

CLIGGETT: The control village.

SCUDDER: And so, the land and the areas to which -- there wasn't sufficient land with the dam being heightened, with the reservoir being bigger, with many of the resettlement areas that had been selected going to be flooded and so, at the last moment the government looked around and found some lands which had not yet been occupied downstream from the Zam -- from the -- the dam about a hundred miles from where the existing villages were. And so, 6,000 people were moved 01:39:00down to this area as you know, to Lusitu about 40 -- 30 to 40 miles below -- below Kariba and they were moved into an area with a totally different ethnic group, people who spoke not a Central Bantu language, but a southern Bantu language related to Shona of the Goba. Now, remember what we're talking about is, did we know some of these problems at the time of the fieldwork?

CLIGGETT: Yes.

SCUDDER: Well, it was made very clear that these 6,000 people who moved into Lusitu that the ritual authority over this land was the Goba and remained with the Goba and that therefore if the Tonga wanted to go to a rain shrine when the rains didn't come they jolly well would go to the Goba rain shrine and they certainly could not reestablish their own rain shrines. Well, this was the information we got during the -- the re-study in '62-'63 because we were there. 01:40:00We saw that -- that the Goba were saying, well okay, you -- we -- we've agreed with the government, you can move into our area but it's our area and --

CLIGGETT: And we'll give you land temporarily.

SCUDDER: We'll give you -- well, that came up later on. Land which was uncultivated at the time -- the government, in effect, could not allow the Goba to take back --

CLIGGETT: Uh-huh.

SCUDDER: -- but cultivated fields which the Goba would actually cultivate or had cultivated recently -- in other words, the more fertile alluvial soils which the Goba being a relatively small population -- why? we don't know, probably because they had been wiped out by the influenza epidemic and what was that? 1928?

CLIGGETT: 19 -- 1919 or 1918 --

SCUDDER: -- 1918 and 1919. Okay. Or maybe it was a -- a -- an epidemic of human trypanosomiasis, sleeping sickness, which periodically -- the Rhodesian variety of sleeping sickness periodically arises in the middle Zambezi Valley and hits 01:41:00populations. It hit populations who were resettled in the -- on the Southern Rhodesian side for example. Anyhow, unlike the Tonga the Goba buried their dead in cemeteries whereas the Tonga buried their dead just outside the house and so, when these 6,000 Tonga were moved into this area and saw all of these cemeteries for that relatively small population you can imagine they were terrified. And so, of course, we saw that. They at the same time were not allowed to reestablish ritual control over the land -- what the political control over the land, that was a little bit uncertain. Chief Chikongo -- the old Chief Sikongo remained back in the what we called the Matongo, the old land, resettled inland from the reservoir but he appointed a younger man who was going to be the Chief Sikongo in the Lusitu and so, he was definitely going to be the man who would in 01:42:00charge of those villages, that would Sikongo villages rather than Chikongo villages but from a ritual point of view the whole area was -- was Chikongo's. And as you know when Chief Chipepo died Chief Sikongo didn't want him buried in the Lusitu. He has been buried in the Lusitu which is very interesting. That's something we have to look into. See, all of these dynamics mean that's something we have to look into. I mean I've been there since 1956 now there's something I have to look into, you know, who [inaudible] [coughs]. So, the Tonga in being resettled through their district -- the district council -- rural council had a very -- the only university-educated Tonga -- Gwembe Tonga was Ezekiel Habanyama who was quite an amazing person who had insisted and gotten the district council to assist, that relocation would only occur under certain circumstances -- ten points that the district council came up with and which the provincial 01:43:00administration agreed to. And one of the points was that the tsetse fly had to be controlled in the resettlement area. So, that those Tonga who had cattle to move their cattle into those areas and those Tonga who didn't could in effect get cattle and could may the transition if they wished from [inaudible] cultivation to extraction. Well, Lusitu was a tsetse area and a bad tsetse area and tsetse is still a problem there because it comes across from -- from Zimbabwe. The Goba did not have cattle and so, when the Tonga moved into the area they did establish - and this is one of the interesting adaptive mechanisms - they established institutional friendships with the Goba where they would make their cattle available to the Goba for plowing their fields in return for the Goba giving them alluvial gardens in the delta of the Lusitu or along the edge of the Lusitu which weren't under cultivation. Well, now in recent years -- in 01:44:00the last twenty years the Goba have now been asking for those gardens back and are being getting those gardens back. So, you see a whole bunch of processes were in motion by the re-study in '62-'63 which we then wanted to follow full time.

CLIGGETT: Right. I need to take a break for a second.

Okay, we're back after lunch on May 20th 1:30 in the afternoon and continuing on with our discussion and I guess I'll start out with another question about what you knew or didn't know back during that second fieldwork time with the Gwembe in '62-'63. Did you know what applied anthropology was at that time and were you already thinking about applications and the -- the reality of what this research could do for future planning and things like that? At what point did you start thinking about applying the knowledge that came out of this research?

SCUDDER: No, I don't think I had any awareness of policy relevant research. After the -- the initial study I was still a graduate student --

CLIGGETT: After the initial study you're talking?

SCUDDER: Hmm -- and so, I had to concentrate on coming back to Harvard to [coughs] finish up course work, take languages, I spent -- I think I spent ten days on French and about two weeks on German --

CLIGGETT: To test out of them?

SCUDDER: Uhmhm.

CLIGGETT: Uhmhm.

SCUDDER: That shows you how useful -- I should say useless those criteria were because it was just a cram session --

CLIGGETT: Right.

SCUDDER: -- and once it was over I've forgotten them and I -- not able to really 01:46:00use French in a systematic fashion --

CLIGGETT: But you had studied French presumable undergrad or secondary's?

SCUDDER: No. No, Spanish -- four years of Spanish but see, because of my -- then again, you see, a lot of these requirements are not in the interest of students because I had four years of Spanish and four years of Latin at Exeter and we weren't required to take any languages at Harvard. Young -- young people with interest in, you know, potentially academic things need more guidance. Uh, was your question related to after the second -- after the re-study or after the first study and then --

CLIGGETT: Well, more after -- more during and after the re-study. So, you had your Ph.D. -- I guess prior to going back to Zambia you were at the America University at Aswan.

SCUDDER: Well, see that's the thing -- yeah, I'm trying to figure out how --

CLIGGETT: Yeah, maybe you should talk a little bit about the Aswan and America 01:47:00University at Cairo period. How did you get there?

SCUDDER: So, I got my Ph.D. in '60 -- June of '60 Molly and I were told that if we could get our Plymouth suburban which had been given to us by her parents and with New England and salt on the road it had rusted through so, that you could see through the holes in the floor to -- to the road underneath. We were told my a neighboring gas station that if we could get it there they'd give us ten bucks and if we couldn't they'd charge us ten dollars to tow it. So, we wanted to get rid of that and we just got it there and so, we got our ten bucks. Took our furniture over to my godmother's who lived on Coolidge Hill which is a nice location just outside of Harvard Square area, left it all in her basement, delivered my dissertation with a ribbon to whatever office you have to deliver 01:48:00such things to, and hopped on a plane for Africa -- Africa, for England with our two children because I had received two fellowships. One was a Harvard traveling fellowship and one was a SSRC postdoctoral fellowship and the SSRC one was a little better I think as I recall. So, I took the SSRC one for spending a year postdoc at London School for Economics.

CLIGGETT: And how had you decided to go there?

SCUDDER: Because of British social anthropology and LSE's reputation outside of -- of -- of anthropology and because I was told that -- oh, and Firth was there, Raymond Firth was there and [Isaac] Schapera southern Africa, you see, was there.

CLIGGETT: And these people had you met while you were --

SCUDDER: No, but I think I had been told that -- that Schapera would be a good person to be my adviser when I got there. So, anyhow, we -- we -- we -- and we picked up on arrival Bedford Dormobile which -- it's like a VW camper --

CLIGGETT: Uh-huh.

SCUDDER: -- put up the roof like an accordion bellows and it's got a stove in it and bunks for four people So, that -- us and the two children. So, we figured that -- we arrived in June and so, we spent the whole summer camping throughout Scotland and Ireland and then arrived back in London where we rented a -- the old royal gamekeeper's cottage at Hampton Court. And the royal gamekeeper's cottage was across the main road which is front of Hampton Court right up next to Bushy Park which is a beer -- a deer park with red deer, fallow deer, roe 01:50:00deer, what-have-you. And we could climb out of our window and the little girls could climb out of the window and play with the deer. And I think we paid something like five pounds a month in this sub -- sub -- in semi-terranean -- it was -- you know, in effect a semi-subterranean dwelling because the only warm part of it was below ground and that's where the kitchen was and the -- the stove for putting coal into. And it was in a mess, it belonged to a couple who were artists who were in the process of trying slowly fix it up a bit and so, you know, they allowed us to -- to rent it cheaply provided we would sort of be there when the carpenter came in to pound on the walls and -- and that kind of thing. And so, every day I would walk across the main road, walk through the grounds of Bushy Park and Hampton Court Palace across the bridge into East Molesey and then catch the -- the train into Waterloo and then walk across to -- to London School of Economics. And I remember going into Schapera's office, 01:51:00knocking on his door and saying, Well, I'm Thayer Scudder, I'm here on a year, I think you know from Social Science Research Council that they have arranged for you to be my adviser. And Schapera looked at me and he said, I don't have enough time for that. [Cliggett chuckling] And that's the last I saw of Schapera for the next nine months.

CLIGGETT: No-o.

SCUDDER: Yeah.

CLIGGETT: [chuckle] You hadn't arranged this with him beforehand?

SCUDDER: Well, Social Science Research Council had --

CLIGGETT: Was supposed to have done that?

SCUDDER: -- had made all the arrangements.

CLIGGETT: I see.

SCUDDER: So, apparently, he knew about it but -- but fortunately, Raymond Firth who probably is one the -- one of the nicest anthropologists that you can imagine heard about me being at loose ends and he had a seminar for graduate students who had just returned from the field --

CLIGGETT: Uh.

SCUDDER: -- and there must have been about seven or eight of them and we met 01:52:00every week and so, actually working with Firth in that seminar was far better than working with Schapera.

CLIGGETT: Who were some of the students in that seminar --

SCUDDER: You know, that's a funny thing because I cannot remember a single one of them --

CLIGGETT: Not a single one?

SCUDDER: -- because they were all -- they were all undergrads -- actu -- undergrads, they were graduate students. I'm sure I've met them at different times since then but -- but they'd been -- some had been to Africa, some had been to Asia. I had to give a paper, they had to give papers -- it was an interesting year. I cannot remember actually what I did during that year --

CLIGGETT: Were you writing at that time?

SCUDDER: No. No. No.

CLIGGETT: Were you turning your --

SCUDDER: It was just a hell of a lot of fun. You know, every weekend we'd hop in the Bedford Dormobile and go down to the New Forest -- I remember far more the travels. And then the following summer we drove the Bedford Dormobile up to Hull 01:53:00and put it on a ferryboat to go over to Bergen and then drove all through Scandinavia and then we drove down to -- into France, over to Germany, through Switzerland, and down to Italy, to Genoa and put her on a boat and shipped her off to Alexandria [inaudible] Egypt [coughs]. I had two job offers when I was at LSE, one was arranged pretty much by Elizabeth. She wanted me to go to Sudan and take up a position at the University of Khartoum because her colleague Ian Cunnison was there at that time teaching and she thought that -- said, Ian had -- had done his work in the northern part of Zambia and -- and was on the faculty there that he would be a good mentor for me. But I'd also, been offered 01:54:00a job by an old friend of mine, Alan Horton who was the dean as I recall at the American University of Cairo, was aware of the work that I'd done with Elizabeth in the Rhodesias and the Ford Foundation had just [coughs] given to AUC, the American University of Cairo Social Research Center a big grant to do a benchmark study of the Egyptian Nubian population before they were relocated in connection with the Aswan High Dam, 50,000 people. And it was a research project which was headed up by my old friend, Bob Fernea which whom I'd been a Danforth fellow for a while --

CLIGGETT: Right.

SCUDDER: -- and so, both Bob and -- and Alan were aware of my work at Kariba and So, they invited me to join the team to do the similar benchmark work with the High Dam. And -- but that was by far more interesting to me than -- than -- than 01:55:00sitting in Khartoum for -- for a year --

CLIGGETT: Uhmhm.

SCUDDER: -- in a hellishly hot environment. So, we -- we arrived in Cairo at the beginning of the fall semester in September. I taught until January and then I worked on the -- the High Dam project from January to the departure in time to go back for the re-study in Zambia.

CLIGGETT: So, what were you doing on that High Dam project?

SCUDDER: Well, the -- the grant that Fernea had included four community studies, three studies in different parts of Nubia because they were different linguistic communities, 50,000 people that were going to be resettled and then another study which was among Nubians who had been relocated -- the Aswan Dam was 01:56:00originally built in 1902 and it was heightened in 1913 and then it was heightened another time in 1932 and each time [coughs] the poor Nubians were relocated. The first -- the first three times a number would just move back to the edge of the reservoir, then they were heightening the dam and they had to move again and then they heightened the dam a third time and then move again. But in the meanwhile, some of them got fed up and had moved downstream into the command area and so, another study was of a Nubian community in a place downstream from -- from Aswan. So, my job was to do pretty much what I'd done with Kariba but more ecological. I was meant to do a -- an ecological survey of Egyptian Nubia and my job was to find out why they had the highest labor migration rate in the world obviously because of these -- these dams and why in effect the Nubian population was probably the first African population which was 01:57:00not predominantly urban because having lived in this Nubian homeland which goes from Aswan all the way down into the Sudan to Dongola, down at the Fourth Cataract, it's just a narrow strip over Nile alluvium with desert on both sides and so, as populations increased the Nubians had to move and so, at the time of our study, the study also included an urban sociologist by the name of Peter Geisse -- Geiser G-E-I-S-E-R who I guess is recently retired from Cal State Hayward. Peter's job was to study urban Nubians. And it was Peter who pretty much found out that the large majority of Nubians now are in Cairo, Alexandria, and places like Khartoum, urban areas of Sudan and -- and Egypt. Anyhow, Peter had to pick a sample to do his study and so, he and I with our two Egyptian 01:58:00research assistants rented a felucca, a sailing boat --

CLIGGETT: Uh-huh.

SCUDDER: -- in Aswan and we traveled all the way up the Nile to the Sudan border --

CLIGGETT: Whew.

SCUDDER: -- visiting in effect every -- every second or so community and in every community, we had a stratified sample. I guess it was a -- it was a -- it was a random sample of household maybe every fourth household or every fifth household or what-have-you and then we'd go to them and get the names of people who were in Cairo. But this gave me a chance to in effect get a feel for changes in labor migration rates as we moved away from the influence of the Aswan Dam - the original dam because this was before the High Dam was built - the -- the 01:59:00influence of the various heightenings and of the -- of the reservoir which pretty much petered out, you see, when you got to the Sudan border. So, what I did was, I picked four communities with 100 percent labor migration rates, not a single male in them over the age of 13 --

CLIGGETT: Whew.

SCUDDER: -- and they were pretty much all downstream. And then further upstream I picked the four communities with the lowest labor migration rates which still was pretty high -- I mean they were running over 50 percent but there were at least some men in the village. Then with a first-rate research assistant who, frankly, I think was eventually going to outdo Geertz this was Abdul El-Zein, got his Ph.D. eventually at the University of Chicago maybe under Geertz or maybe after Geertz left to go to Princeton, then got tenure eventually at Temple 02:00:00and was in the process of certainly becoming a major figure in symbolic anthropology and as I say might very well today have been the major figure but like so, many Egyptians ate with a vengeance, got too large and died of a heart attack in his forties.

CLIGGETT: When.

SCUDDER: Anyhow, Zein and I were given a -- a motorboat, just like Land Rover back in -- in Zambia or in Northern Rhodesia in 1956, we were given a motorboat with two 30-horsepower engines which we had to -- had to maintain and -- and service with and spent a wonderful -- I can't even remember how much it was but it was a couple of months visiting these eight villages and in effect mapping all of the resources which were in the village and then also, interviewing all of the people from these villages that we could find in urban areas of Egypt. 02:01:00This was in effect when I developed the idea of the -- anthropologists really in studying labor migration have to study the migrants both in the receiving and in the --

CLIGGETT: Yes.

SCUDDER: -- sending community. See, we didn't do that in 1956-'57 but we did start doing it in '62-'63, well, that came out of the Aswan High Dam study. Now, the Aswan High Dam study like the Kariba study didn't have direct policy implications because the research was carried out too late. You know, the decisions in the Kariba had already been made where the people were going to be moved and -- and we -- the only time that Elizabeth and I actually had an impact perhaps were -- would be occasionally when we'd be having a gin and tonic or something at the -- at the Boma and the district commissioner or the district officer might say, well, what do you think about this, you know, or something like but we had no policy input. In the Aswan High Dam case there was more of a 02:02:00policy input because Bob Fernea met periodically with the Minister of Social Affairs or with people in the Ministry of Social Affairs which were responsible for carrying out the resettlement and I think -- again, the planning had pretty much been carried out, you see, because this research was when? '61-'62 and the High Dam construction was underway and what we learned about resettlement is that you cannot -- you -- you got to have the plans all ahead before construction begins. They should be done during project appraisal. So, again, it was too late and Hussein [Fahim] who was just visiting me a couple of weeks ago, who is the leading scholar of Nubian Resettlement today - I've read a couple of books which I have up there on Nubian resettlement - and he's made it very clear 02:03:00that -- that the Nubian project was very important as a salvage anthropology project just like as the UNESCO salvage work on the archeology was -- was -- was necessarily but it was carried out too late to have an impact on policy. Nonetheless, Fernea and myself in our discussions were very well aware of the policy implications of our research. So, by then I was very well aware -- not only I was very well aware but Fernea, myself, Francisco [Benes], a Spaniard anthropologist, and Alphonse Said, an Egyptian sociologist at that time had all agreed to form what became the Institute for Development Anthropology --

CLIGGETT: O-oh.

SCUDDER: -- that was in 1962-'63.

CLIGGETT: You met these people in association with the Aswan project?

SCUDDER: Yeah. Yeah.

CLIGGETT: And that is -- was the beginning of the idea --

SCUDDER: From my point of view. I mean I had nothing to do with David Brokensha or -- or -- or Michael Horowitz, in other words, the idea came up -- I think the 02:04:00-- all of us played an important role but the key person was Francisco and he died in a motorcycle accident shortly after that and nothing happened with the idea, but the idea was in my mind.

CLIGGETT: That's --

SCUDDER: That was 1962.

CLIGGETT: -- that anthropological research --

SCUDDER: Yeah, and --

CLIGGETT: -- would have an impact -- a systematic impact on policy.

SCUDDER: Very much of an impact on policy.

CLIGGETT: I see.

SCUDDER: Yeah, very much. So, that study was very important in making me aware of the fact -- and you see, at the same time I was beginning a comparative analysis of resettlement. I hadn't developed the resettlement theory that I had come up with later on, the four-stage theory, at that time because there was 02:05:00only one case where resettlement had been implemented and I hadn't gone back to -- to Zambia yet, you see, So, this was two bench -- benchmark studies but I had come to the conclusion that - and this is important and people haven't realized this - that study of people undergoing developmental relocation is a quasi-laboratory situation, that you have a community which you can study before a major permutation in their lives -- I mean a major -- I mean, you know --

CLIGGETT: Yeah. [inaudible]

SCUDDER: -- talking which is -- is really going to have a -- a tremendous impact on them and then you could go back and see what happens. In other words, you aren't yourself carrying out the experiment manipulating the population but somebody else was and you had the opportunity to study this and you could do this on a cross-cultural, cross-environmental, cross-political context So, it's a quasi-laboratory kind of situation and that excited me.

CLIGGETT: And that became clear to you really while you were working at Aswan?

SCUDDER: Oh yeah. Yeah, and So, --

CLIGGETT: And you hadn't even gone back yet for --

SCUDDER: No. No.

CLIGGETT: -- post relocation?

SCUDDER: And you see, again, in -- in setting up the -- the -- setting up something like the Institute for Developmental -- with Fernea, and Said, and Francisco, and -- and myself were talking was setting up an institute which would in effect do research for policy purposes. So, the whole concept of IDA -- now, I don't know when Michael Horowitz first developed the concept, he might have come with it at that time too, and David Brokensha independently might have come up with it too, but we didn't form IDA until 1976.

CLIGGETT: Uh-huh.

SCUDDER: So, in other words you see fifteen years had gone by with this idea lying dormant --

CLIGGETT: Uh-huh.

SCUDDER: -- but that's when it first arose, that we saw -- and there was much talk about this too, you see, because I mean the Ford Foundation probably in part -- in funding the -- the Nubian study was hoping that it would have an 02:07:00implica -- impact on -- on -- on policy. Alright, so, that year in Egypt was -- was very important from that point of view and, of course, it was fascinating too, you see, because it gave me a chance to work in a -- a Muslim society, Nubians are 100 percent Muslim but had previously -- Nubia had previously been Christian and -- and then they converted to Islam and a very sophisticated population too. I mean one reason why -- the Nubian -- and see, interestingly enough we now know that the Aswan -- the Nubian resettlement is probably the most successful in the world --

CLIGGETT: Uhm, because --

SCUDDER: Now you have the question why? Well, one reason is that the Egyptian government I think feeling a little sorry for the Nubians because they had been 02:08:00screwed in the past so, badly were willing to listen to them and create a major irrigation project for them so, they reclaimed a large area in the command area below the High Dam, a place called Kom Ombo and the large majority of the res -- Nubians were resettled there on their own irrigation project.

CLIGGETT: Whew.

SCUDDER: At the same time being aware of the implications of resettlement -- the relatives having been resettled an x number of times in the past and some on them -- no, because the -- see, the last resettlement had been in '33 So, none of sort of the -- well, some of the existing adults had -- as children had been -- been resettled, played a pretty strong negotiation role with the government --

CLIGGETT: Right.

SCUDDER: -- you know, I mean there was a lot of consultation. They didn't really participate in terms of designing the plans, but they were -- they were asked where they wanted to resettle and -- and they were a force. And then -- then 02:09:00another reason was their experience with labor migration, you see. But the main reason in my opinion was that they were given their own irrigation project and that's rare. I'm not aware of any other cases in the world where resettlers have been given their own project.

CLIGGETT: All of the people resettled had access to the irrigation project?

SCUDDER: And nobody else.

CLIGGETT: Whew.

SCUDDER: Just for the Nubians. And now the government intended - and see, this is where the Nubian's sophistication is important - the government wanted the Nubians, of course, to cultivate this land and they wanted it to cultivate them -- they wanted it -- they wanted them to cultivate it in sugar because there were under-capacity sugar refineries in the vicinity. Well, the Nubians weren't interested in cultivating sugar. So, immediately -- almost immediately - and according to Hussein [Fahim] - about 90 percent of the land now is cultivated now by Upper-Egyptian sharecroppers but then the Nubians used that capital --

CLIGGETT: Right.

SCUDDER: -- to move into a whole ra -- like the -- the Gwembe Tonga used the fisheries capital to finance -- capitalize a whole range of other ventures, well, the Nubians then reused -- used the -- the -- the irrigation project as a stepping stone to diversify their production system, to educate their children, to get their women to be the first women in Upper-Egypt to -- to vote, and today dominate the political economy of Aswan Province meanwhile continuing labor migration, establishing small businesses in Cairo, some of them returning to open up villages around the reconstituted Abu Simbel -- the temple of Abu Simbel which is up on the reservoir edge and so on. Okay, but -- that's getting ahead. So, then back to Zambia for the restudy and so, that brings us up to -- to 1963 and your earlier question about -- you know, had we learned things then at the 02:11:00restudy which were instrumental in wanting us to turn it into a long-term study and the answer was yes and I gave you some examples of that in terms of political ritual authority which was changing or had changed for -- for resettlers and Zambia, as I said, was about to get in -- independence in '64 So, it made sense to broaden the study, to deal not just with resettlement but with changing continuity in Gwembe Tonga society.

CLIGGETT: With an eye towards policy?

SCUDDER: With?

CLIGGETT: An eye towards policy?

SCUDDER: No, No. No, not at that time.

CLIGGETT: I can understand how resettlement would be a clear path towards -- contributing towards policy development but I'm wondering --

SCUDDER: Well, we have to go -- we have to go on with the story -- So, in -- in '63 with Molly and I having been overseas for three years and we came back to -- to the United States out-of-sight out-of-mind but because of -- of -- of Lockard 02:12:00interest -- Derwood Lockard -- yeah, Derwood Lockard's interest in -- in -- in my career I was able to get a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies which enabled me to -- to write up my Nubian labor migration stuff. While there I reestablished my contacts with Phil [Gulliver] at Boston University. Around April of '94 [note of transcriber: he probably means '64], he -- Phil was asked by the World Bank to join three economists and an agronomist to make a study -- a Pan African study of small-holder agriculture. 02:13:00Phil for one reason or other couldn't do it and so, he recommended me. That -- So, I resigned my -- my -- my postdoc at Harvard and went to the Bank as a consultant for, I guess, a couple of weeks and then they sent -- then -- then the five of us went over to -- to Africa and did fieldwork among small-holder farmers in Kenya. For example, in Machakos among the Kamba, in -- in Nyeri district among the [Kukuju], in Elgeo Marakwet among a range of different ethnic groups there, and then in what was Tanzania -- this was just after the independence, you see, of -- of Kenya at that particular time, and then in -- in 02:14:00Tanzania the [Sukuma] on the edges of Lake Victoria just around [Mwanwanza], and I -- I spent the summer -- I spent the summer there. While a postdoc, of course, I'd been applying for jobs and the two most interesting were one at Cal Tech and one at -- at MIT but the MIT one was -- neither of those places had anthropologists at that time -- well, Cal Tech had had a -- had a lecturer in anthropology and I think he had -- he was -- he had certainly left by the time I got there. Whether he left the year before or -- or just before I arrived I don't know but he wasn't a tenure-track person. I don't think MI -- MIT had any anthropologist. I was going to be hired in the faculty of Political Economy, you know, with -- this was Max Millikan's outfit, Economics, Lucian [W.] Pye and Political Se -- Science, Daniel Lerner -- very, very, very, very good, first 02:15:00rate macro-eco -- economist and political scientist but I was going to be just hired, you know, as a -- as an assistant professor to -- I think what they wanted me to teach was Marxist socialism or something of that nature whereas the Cal Tech appointment not only did they pay more but enabled Molly and I to get away from my relatives [chuckle] --

CLIGGETT: You know, this is going to be a public document [chuckle] --

SCUDDER: That's fine, no problem. And many of whom I'm devoted to but -- but, you know, let's face it, New Englanders are quite provincial. They may see Boston as the hub and the center of the universe but it's not and quite a few of the relatives were -- were not at all supportive of -- of the younger generation leaving -- I mean, for example, both Molly's brother and sister have continued living in New England. My brother has continued living on the East Coast and so, on and so, with Molly -- with the blessing of Molly's -- Molly's father who is a 02:16:00professor at Harvard and the blessing of my father we took the Cal Tech one where, of course, I was going to be the only anthropologist and nobody would -- would know what the hell I was doing -- or care less-- see, you'll notice that I know quite a few people and I'll say hello to them and they all smile and what-have-you and the reason why they like me is that I don't threaten anybody because I don't compete for resources --

CLIGGETT: That's right.

SCUDDER: -- for anybody. So, you know, there -- it's -- it's ideal. For me Cal Tech has been a monastery in which -- as a -- as a monk I work away happily in my little research arena with a relatively light teaching load, with incredibly bright students, with nice colleagues who -- who I don't threaten and who won't threaten me, with Cal Tech never turning down a single request for leave with pay or for any other computer facilities or this and that and the other thing. 02:17:00So, it's, you know, it's been ideal provided, of course, I had many activities outside of the Cal Tech universe of which, of course, the Gwembe Tonga research project was one. IDA when we get to it, the development of that in the -- in the 1970s was another and we'll get to some others in a few minutes. So, going back to -- to the work with the World Bank, that resulted in a two-volume study which didn't come out until 1967. So, in other words I had a part-time as a consultant even though I came to Cal Tech in September of '74 So, my full-time consultancy with the World Bank was like say, you know, May through August. This book went to press probably in -- in 1996 So, I continued my close relationship --

CLIGGETT: 1966?

SCUDDER: -- six -- yeah, 1966. I continued my close relationship with the Bank throughout that time period and this two-volume study called Experiences of 02:18:00Agricultural Development in Tropical Africa, John C. De Wilde he was the head of it, et al. Volume I, the Synthesis; Volume II, the Case Studies by John C. De Wilde assisted by Peter F. M. McLoughlin, very good economist, André Guinard, a very good French agronomist, Thayer Scudder, and Robert Manbouche, another economist. It is still in my opinion the best overview of small-holder agriculture in Africa. And -- and it was published by John Hopkins University Press and the

Case Studies are 400 pages and the Synthesis is 250 pages. So, that, of course, cemented -- you see, by -- by -- that was the -- that was the -- the -- the summer of -- of '64 So, certainly by '64 I really knew that not only that 02:19:00anthropology have major policy implications but organizations like the World Bank or at least individuals in the World Bank -- of course, John C. De Wilde was ahead of his time, he -- he was -- he was the chief economist at the Bank, sort of the economic adviser at the Bank I -- I believe but many of his ideas were not picked up by the Bank until the '70s when -- when a chap who had done a lot of research in Rhodesia, Montague Yudelman came in and began to get the Bank to, I think, implement a whole range of -- of poverty alleviation and other kinds of strategies -- and not so, much poverty alleviation but the facilitation of African small-holder entrepreneurship in agriculture and in non-farm employment opportunities.

CLIGGETT: Before we go on to more things in that -- to that trajectory, with that book as kind of the example can you talk a little bit about the process of collaborating with those kind of people, people who are deeply -- they were at the World Bank?

SCUDDER: Yeah. Yeah. You see, that -- that again I think is something which is -- anthropologists don't do enough of and you see in the Nubian project I had collaborated with Peter Geiser, a sociologist, very closely. We traveled together up the Nile to pick the sample -- his sample and my sample. And then with the World Bank I was the anthropologist with three economists and an agronomist representing -- and I was the only American, see, also, Manbouche was French, André Guinard was French, John De Wilde was Belgian although he may 02:21:00have become American, Peter McLoughlin was Canadian.

CLIGGETT: Uhmhm.

SCUDDER: And we worked together as a team, very closely as a team.

CLIGGETT: Traveling from country to country doing the census --

SCUDDER: That's right. And -- and, you know, spending the nights in a hotel, frequently sharing rooms with Peter McLoughlin, Peter -- you know, Peter and I were the youngest and, you know, having -- having to operate -- work as a team over a two-three year period and I think probably my hitchhiking, for example, and my experiences at [Yopping] Hill in dealing with -- with those two things -- dealing with different ages, people -- dealing with people in different disciplines, dealing with people in different occupations probably -- probably helped. But remember that I came from Cal Tech because I didn't want to be in a Department of Anthropology so, you see already by then I wanted to be in a wider 02:22:00intel --

[End of Tape 2, Side 1]

[ Begin of Tape 2, Side 2]

CLIGGETT: You wanted to be in a wider disciplinary --

SCUDDER: Intellectual environment not necessary dominated by scientists although both MIT and Cal Tech were, I mean I don't -- that was --although all of my good friends at Cal Tech during the first few years were not in this division. They were -- they remained -- well, the physicists adopted Molly and I. I think they were sort of curious about this -- this -- this mascot who was brought in, that nobody knew, you know, what he did and he didn't threaten anybody but they might be interesting so, that the -- the physicists would take us out into the desert, for example, on their desert trips and invite us to their -- to their -- their meals and the soirees and things of this nature for a couple of years till the -- the novelty of us wore off and then -- then I very quickly joined a group of hiking people none of whom were from this division, there was James Bonner who 02:23:00was a first-grade biologist, there was Robert Christy a physicist who later became provost, there was Richard Schuster who was in charge of Cal Tech's office development -- Office of Development and was a -- was -- was trained in chemical engineering as I recall. Okay, but now -- we're getting ahead of ourselves so, let's stop for a minute.

CLIGGETT: Yeah. Back to this World Bank project --

SCUDDER: Yeah.

CLIGGETT: -- collaboration. I -- I'd like to know the nuts and bolts -- the nuts and bolts of being in the field with these people and when you're dealing with people from different disciplines surely you have to negotiate even definitions of terms, strategies of collecting data, can you talk a little bit about what -- I mean this was your first World Bank experience officially as a consultant to World Bank, correct?

SCUDDER: Uhmhm.

CLIGGETT: And --

SCUDDER: None of those questions ever struck me as a problem. I -- there -- 02:24:00there was no problem -- I mean, you know, we just sat down and -- and -- and -- and said we -- to a large extent I think I was the one who set the methodology, we're going out to study small farmers. None of the rest had studied small farmers, I had studied small farmers.

CLIGGETT: So, they listened to you right from the start?

SCUDDER: Must have.

CLIGGETT: [chuckle] Not that you were some authoritarian dictator --

SCUDDER: No, must -- they must have because John De Wilde wanted an anthropologist. I mean he'd asked Phil Gulliver and so, he must've known that anthropologists were the people who had the best knowledge and methodology for studying small-scale farmers. The World Bank had done nothing with sm -- virtually nothing with small-scale farmers before that. You see, the Bank was to a large extent a funder of large infrastructure.

CLIGGETT: My impression is that these days there is a lot of other disciplines who have experienced doing these things and that, from what I hear, anthropologists are not given that level of respect or legitimacy, that often 02:25:00it's other disciplinary experts.

SCUDDER: Well, it that's the case it's the fault of anthropologists to a certain extent. Back in the '60s you got to realize that organizations like the World Bank orientation was macroeconomics --

CLIGGETT: Right.

SCUDDER: -- not micro dealing with, you know, very, very, very macro issues with a methodology [Joseph E.] Stiglitz points this out in his book on -- on globalization, one approach fits all --

CLIGGETT: Right.

SCUDDER: -- contexts --

CLIGGETT: Right.

SCUDDER: -- the hell with cultural variation and things of this nature. So, now we're going out to Kenya and -- and who is the person you see that he had first wanted to get? Phil Gulliver who'd done all of his research in Kenya. So, in other words, John De Wilde definitely wanted to get an anthropologist who had done research in Africa to study small-scale agricultural households [coughs]. 02:26:00So, my guess is that I pretty much had a free hand in developing the interview that we did with each farming household whereas John and the other two economists dealt with the -- the policy context as the re -- I mean all of the other things which were instrumental research, extension, and what-have-you which -- and policy -- the policy issues, price structure, rural-urban terms of trade, all of these kinds of things they dealt with and Guinard pretty much dealt with the -- the agricultural technical side. And so, we all listened to André on that kind of thing. We all listened to the economist on the macro side and they all listened to me on the anthropological side and there was no 02:27:00problem. I -- we had no fights whatsoever, never and there was never a single -- and, you know, I -- I do believe that one of the biggest problems in policy work and in applied work are the inability of people to get along with each other.

CLIGGETT: Right.

SCUDDER: I think you got to be willing to meet -- if the job is important you got to be willing to meet the person if necessary and hopefully it's not, more than fifty percent of the way and -- and if you cannot do that then -- then he shouldn't -- shouldn't get involved in that kind of work. So, we got along fine. We remain close friends. I think they're all dead now -- well, I don't know, may -- I think Manbouche -- the only one I didn't keep up with later was Manbouche because he left the Bank -- I think he went back to France. Guinard left the Bank too -- well now, Guinard was with FAO. That's another thing, you see, is 02:28:00that Guinard -- John De Wilde was willing to hire people from with -- outside the Bank whereas the Bank, you know, doesn't like to use for this kind of thing, people from outside but if it was necessary it will hire consultants. There were no anthropologists in the Bank at that time. Guinard worked for -- oh yes, he worked for BDPA a French parastatal bureau [Bureau pour le Developpement de la Production Agricole] for -- for -- for the study of agricultural production, it was a French parastatal and he was the director of research in BDPA. Because I wasn't involved in the second part of the study, the second part of the study dealt with several countries -- francophone countries in West Africa. So, the case study is about East Africa and West Africa for comparative purposes. André Guinard -- once we set up IDA we hired André as our agronomist on a project that we ran in the '80s in -- in Senegal. So, I kept up with him. I would always 02:29:00go and visit John De Wilde whenever I went to Washington until he retired and moved away. And Peter McLoughlin he and I stepped -- kept in great close touch for years and years, I think he's dead now -- yeah, and André is dead now and John -- John De Wilde is dead -- I don't know about -- about Manbouche. So, certainly -- So, you know, the realization that anthropology has major application -- major policy implications certainly I and colleagues like Fedrea, we were aware of by 1962 and then, you see, my work with the World Bank showed that the application of anthropology could apply to cross-cultural studies of 02:30:00African small-holder agriculture. And one of the things that I'd been pushing conceptually I think whatever -- whenever possible is that anthropologists don't just have areal expertise and -- and unfortunately and -- and I think we have done poor job of selling ourselves here. Usually when the World Bank hires an anthropologist it's because they have a project with the Masai and they want to get an anthropologist who studies Masai, but we got topical expertise too and we have more topical expertise on some topics. For example, Michael Horowitz at the time IDA was founded was probably the leading expert on the cross-cultural study of transhumant ethnic pastoralists. Resettlement was another thing where we have expertise which has cross-cultural implications irrespective of culture, 02:31:00political economy, or geography. So, there are a whole range of topics in which some anthropologists where they have done -- and, of course, this goes way, way, way back remember to -- who was it who did the study of cross-cultural comparison --

CLIGGETT: Herskowitz?

SCUDDER: -- Her -- Eggan -- Fred Eggan -- Fred Eggan's work among Southwest native Americans, you know, where he -- he developed methodology of cross-cultural comparisons. Well, we got a hell of a lot of expertise as it -- you're saying other disciplines now are involved but I would maintain the anthropologists are still the people who are most knowledgeable about the household and community and cultural implications of poverty. So, an 02:32:00organization like World Bank which is concerned with poverty alleviation, the most relevant discipline is still anthropology. But because of the problem between applied anthropology and academic anthropology there still is not a first-rate university in the United States turning out systematically graduate students in developmental anthropology. You know, the University of Florida makes an attempt to that but, you know, it's just -- it's -- it's not what the University of -- of Florida is most known for. It's just -- it's just -- and you guys -- you -- you had three people at Kentucky who are concerned with applied anthropology --

CLIGGETT: No, we have -- we have about seven -- seven faculty--

SCUDDER: Seven faculty, yeah. Well, you know --

CLIGGETT: -- in the range of medical and development --

SCUDDER: Yeah.

CLIGGETT: -- but all with applied implications.

SCUDDER: But, you know, it -- it -- it's -- it's pretty rare. You mentioned 02:33:00three universities in Florida which are concerned with it and let's not get on this at the moment. What I'm trying say now is that we have areal ex -- and linguistic expertise, we also, have topical expertise and we have not pushed our topical expertise and we've got a lot of good people out there who have a lot of topical expertise which is not used in policy work. Okay, so, we're now up to 1964.

CLIGGETT: No, let me -- let me push on with this -- this World Bank small-holder farmer thing. So, the World Bank hired you guys to do this research --

SCUDDER: Right.

CLIGGETT: -- and you wrote this two-volume --

SCUDDER: Which the World Bank then ignored.

CLIGGETT: -- well, that's what I want to talk about. So, what about the process of being solicited to do the research but how do you have an impact once you -- how do you make people listen and --

SCUDDER: No guarantee. Consultants -- one reason why I don't do consultancy anymore is that consultants are to be used to fill up holes in the organization 02:34:00you're consulting for and if you don't say what they want you to say it takes an exceptional person in that organization to admit that you're right and use your information. So, I'm afraid the result is that -- and this is a big -- big problem in science with -- with Congress -- it's not enough to write reports and -- and it's probably not enough to sell the results of the reports, you've got to have authority to implement the results or to sign off on somebody else implementing those results. Now, that eventually did happen in the World Bank when we get to Michael Cernea who - I'll just say in passing - many people find him difficult to get along with but thank God, he was there when he was because 02:35:00the impact that he has had on the Bank and the impact he's had on making anthropology and sociology and non-economic social science relevant to policy - and we'll -- we'll talk about that later on - is tremendous. And now that he's gone he's been replaced by nobody and the -- and the Bank is deteriorating as far as the use of sociology and anthropology and non-economic social science. Shows you what -- what one person can do even though a very contentious individual.

CLIGGETT: So, have you had experience with the authority to have things successfully implemented? Where -- where -- where do you see your successes in that territory?

SCUDDER: Well, my -- my -- my -- let's see now, what -- what -- oh, we have to go -- before we get into that topic I want to go a little bit forward with the --

CLIGGETT: Okay.

SCUDDER: -- with the history, okay? The history as it relates to the application of policy. Alright, so, I had finished this program with the -- with the World Bank but then later in the '60s the United Nations -- and this brings up another person who has played a very important role in my career as a mentor. You see, at Harvard it was Cora Du Bois as much as anybody. In anthropology it was Elizabeth Colson who of all of these people I mentioned has had the greatest influence but the person who's had the next greatest influence after Elizabeth was Gilbert White. Gilbert White is a geographer, a member of the National Academy of Science, a rather amazing individual, a devout Quaker who during World War II drove ambulances in Europe, became the president of Haverford College at age 28 --

CLIGGETT: Whew.

SCUDDER: -- after being president for a couple of -- I don't know for how long he was but, you know, decided, okay I've done what I can at Haverford, it's time for a new person -- a new person to come in and -- and I'll go on, became professor of geography at the University of Chicago where I first met him, and he began to involve me in various activities which I'll mention shortly, then went on to the University of Colorado where he established the Institute for Behavioral Sciences. He was at -- all during this time period he -- his Ph.D. dissertation was on floods and flood management and so, he'd gotten very much involved with the Corps of Engineers and -- and a whole range of -- of work, you know, in the United States dealing with -- with flood management, not flood control but flood management. And then he had become senior consultant on 02:38:00river-basin development through the United Nations Development Program, UNDP, and it was in that connection that I met him when he was at the University of Chicago. He asked me to come -- well, no, I had actually met him previously. He -- he -- he pretty much got me involved in the '60s because then dams were becoming more and more important and organizations like FAO, the World Bank, World Health Organization all were involved in major river-basin development projects. But there was virtually nobody who had any knowledge about resettlement and so, since I had done benchmark studies, both at Aswan and at Kariba and a follow-up study at Kariba I was asked then in the 1970s by the UNDP to advise the government of the Ivory Coast on resettlement in connection with their Kossou project and I went out there about three or four times and gave 02:39:00them quite a bit of advice. Then when the Kainji Dam project came along in Nigeria - this is all in the '60s - the Ford Foundation hired me to work with NISER, the Nigerian Institute of Social and Economic Research, in Ibadan and working with my colleagues in Nigeria I was primarily responsible for designing the benchmark studies for Kainji Dam resettlement - this is pre-dam -- pre-dam resettlement - and then subsequently FAO asked me to name people to carry out the benchmark fishery study and the benchmark irrigation study and I nominated a geographer, Wolf Roder at the University of Cincinnati to -- to do the -- do the irrigation study. And I'm -- I'm not exaggerating here so, you know, this is -- this is some influence -- Wolf has now written a book on Human Adjustment: the 02:40:00Kainji Reservoir in Nigeria. What's the date? 1994 because he's gone back there and have done restudies. He says on the preface, Thayer Scudder recruited me for research on traditional agriculture along the Niger at the African Study Association meeting in the fall of 1965. Now, that's having an impact. So, Wolf did the research. Another person I knew -- and why did I nominate Wolf? To get his -- his topical expertise. When I was setting up -- designing with my Nigerian colleagues the research program -- pre-dam research program for Kainji I noticed that a population called the Gungawa were doing much more 02:41:00sophisticated flood rec -- rec -- flood recession agriculture than in Gwembe Tonga. They were using small pumps and they were growing onions which they were then selling as cash crop.

CLIGGETT: Right.

SCUDDER: And I said, well, you know, this is very important to study this. I mean this a very, very interesting -- and, of course, this is small-holder agriculture, going back to the World Bank study. This is all 1967 -- '68 sometime -- you got it in the -- in the CV, the dates of this kind of thing. And so, we -- we -- you know, we need to make a study of this. Well, Wolf had made a study of small-holder irrigation in the Sabi Valley of Zimbabwe. Alright, well, having done that research he should be able to do a similar study in Nigeria.

CLIGGETT: Right. Right.

SCUDDER: Alright, now what about the fishery study? Well, the fisheries was pretty much of a gill net study. A colleague of my, Jonathan Jenness, has studied the gill net fisheries in the Kuskokwim Delta for the Eskimo in Alaska. 02:42:00Well, why the hell can't Jenness do a similar study in Nigeria? Well, the answer was he could. He did a damn good study -- in fact, he never left Africa since then. He continued working for the Kainji Dam project. He then went and worked for land-use planning in Botswana, then he did another job in Lesotho, then he became the adviser to the Commission of the Jonglei Canal project in Sudan and so, on -- on and on it goes. So, you can have some influence as an adviser. You can have some influence as a researcher. For example, the government of Botswana wanted to do a huge big project in the Okavango Delta which is one of the greatest wildlife and -- and -- and wetland areas in the world and they asked 02:43:00the IUCN to -- since --

CLIGGETT: IUCN is --

SCUDDER: IUCN is the World Conservation Union, International Union -- IUCN -- International Union for Conservation of Natural Resources --

CLIGGETT: Okay --

SCUDDER: -- of Nature and Natural Resources.

CLIGGETT: Okay.

SCUDDER: Yeah, International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources. And because people had difficulty with that title they then kind of called the World Conservation Union --

CLIGGETT: I see.

SCUDDER: -- which they call it now. It's a union of hundreds of environmental organizations like probably Audubon, the Sierra Club, and what-have-you, all over the world and governments concerned with natural resources. It was IUCN and the World Bank put together -- started the process going for the World Commission on Dams which we will be talking about later on. So, the government 02:44:00of Botswana when they -- when -- when the safari industries, the tourist industry in the Okavango Delta were worried about these dams and the project [telephone ringing] that the government wanted to do -- the hell with it, I'm going to just let it ring, going three times and then Victoria will pick it up -- I -- I refuse to answer the telephone actually when -- that was probably Gustavo actually for your -- but then Victoria will take the -- take the message. Alright, because of the resistance of the environmental movement, Greenpeace for example were willing to launch diamonds are for dust or death because they felt that the water development was for the diamond mines and so, they would say, if you go ahead with this big project we'll do a -- diamonds are for death campaign and the safari and tourist industries were against the project and So, you know, the government was worried. And so, they asked IUCN to -- to do a study and IUCN put together a team of thirteen of us from five different nations. Again, we'll talk about this more, but it was 02:45:00interdisciplinary. But all I'm trying to say now is that we recommended -- Terminator II had just come out and we recommended the project to be terminated. The government was not pleased. It was their biggest development project --

CLIGGETT: Right.

SCUDDER: -- but we had also, arranged that -- and I was the leader of the study, I was the -- the team leader. So, I had to make these decisions --

CLIGGETT: How did you become the team leader?

SCUDDER: Well, we get -- I said we'll talk about this later --

CLIGGETT: Okay.

SCUDDER: -- I just want to make this particular point of having influence. I had arranged that we didn't have a contract, we had a memorandum of understanding with the government so, the government had no control over our report. And IUCN had no control over our report. Our report would be in effect what the thirteen of us -- and the thirteen of us had a unanimous decision which was quite amazing because we had engineers, people from five different countries and we'll talk about the process later on. Anyhow, we recommended that the project be 02:46:00terminated but we also, had arranged to give a public lecture in the capital of Botswana, in Gaborone --

CLIGGETT: Uh-huh.

SCUDDER: -- to present our results to the Kalahari Conservation Society which was the leading conservation society in the country --

CLIGGETT: Uh-huh.

SCUDDER: -- but whose head -- whose chair was the head of the diamond mines and so, literally an hour before our lecture the government announced that the project had been canceled.

CLIGGETT: Whew.

SCUDDER: They didn't mention, they just took one thing out of our report namely that -- that we had found that the local people would not benefit from it - which the government had said they would - and the local people were against it and so, the government was able to -- I give Botswana a tremendous amount of credit, one, for doing this -- asking an outside agency to study its most important development project. You know, that's amazing. Can you imagine the United States asking Zimbabwe to come in and study a Corps of Engineer's project? No way, so, you have the give the government credit and they were able 02:47:00to do it in such a way that -- to reinforce their demography -- democracy. And they in effect were saying, well, we found out that the local people don't want this project, which is true, therefore we are - they didn't cancel it - we are suspending it.

CLIGGETT: So, is it suspended successfully? Do you think it will reemerge --?

SCUDDER: No.

CLIGGETT: -- in the future?

SCUDDER: No. And we'll get into that later on when we talk about it. Let me just say for the -- for the -- for the moment that the Okavango now has become the world's largest Ramsar site, that is -- Ramsar is a -- is a convention dealing with wetlands of international significance so, it's -- it is a convention and development is not meant to go on within Ramsar areas so, it makes it much easier to criticize the government if they go ahead with a project like this. But also, they're the downstream -- they're the downstream country on the Okavango River and if they go ahead with this kind of project unilaterally and against opposition what's to keep Angola and Namibia from capturing the water 02:48:00resources further up and this is the most important tourist resource the government is now realizing --

CLIGGETT: I see.

SCUDDER: -- and now are getting -- are getting -- tourism is now their second most important source of foreign exchange. So, -- but if it hadn't been for the IUCN study that -- that project would've gone ahead, and it was consisting of two big dams, channelization to speed out the water coming out of the Okavango and so, on. It would have a huge impact. So, research can have a major implication even though you have no control over the result, you can convince people. Now, going back to the advice that Jenness and Roder and earlier on that I had given in the Kainji Dam project, well, in his book Roder said that Kainji 02:49:00resettlement was a success. If that's true it's one of the few success stories that I know of with resettlement other than in Aswan. We've already established that research probably had very little relationship to the success of Aswan. But the third most successful project in Africa according to a geographer, Véronique Lassailly-Jacob, who has done this detailed study of the Kossou project which is the project that I gave advice to on the government in -- in the Ivory Coast is also, considered one of the three most successful in Africa --

CLIGGETT: And --

SCUDDER: -- So, we have in effect by coincidence and maybe not coincidence social-cultural research in not too many African projects, three of which are the most successful resettlement projects in Africa.

CLIGGETT: Success to being determined by improvement of quality of life --

SCUDDER: Not necessarily improvement but at least restoration.

CLIGGETT: Uh-huh. So, people don't --

SCUDDER: The large majority of resettlement projects have worsened the lifestyles --

CLIGGETT: Okay.

SCUDDER: -- of the majority and there are only a few cases -- I 've just completed a statistical analysis for this book that I'm writing on dams, of fifty projects with resettlement and there are less than ten where the project has even been successful in restoring living standards which doesn't mean too much because what would those living standards have been without the project? So, it's a pretty grim record. But the Kainji project, the Aswan project, and the Kossou project all of which involved anthropologists and geographers and what-have-you have been fairly successful. And I think there is a relationship actually between the research in the Kainji case and the Kossou case. Okay, So, 02:51:00where are we now?

CLIGGETT: Well, you're still at Cal Tech. We haven't talked about the -- the birth of IDA which I think we should talk about --

SCUDDER: Yeah. Alright. We were talking about Gilbert White though. Because of Gilbert's influence and because of the fact that nobody other than -- than myself had studied more than two resettlement projects dealing with dams therefore again the serendipity -- UN agencies began to find out about this and so, the UNDP asked me to do the work on the Kossou Dam in the Ivory Coast. WHO asked me to look at the social-cultural implications of increased schistosomiasis in Ghana in connection with the Akosombo project, this had 02:52:00increased among children the incidence of schistosomiasis or bilharzia from very low to up to 90 percent and so, FAO sent me out there -- I mean WHO -- FAO sent me to -- to work on the Kainji project. So, you see by the 1970s -- by -- by 19 -- these are all in the '60s. Then another person who had an influence on me was a Cal Tech professor by the name of Harrison Brown who was professor of geochemistry here and again, not in this division who was the foreign secretary of the National Academy of Sciences and so, Harrison got me involved in work undertaken by an organization called BOSTIN in the National Academy, bore on science and technology in international development. Harrison had been very 02:53:00active in all the various international Pugwash Conferences as the foreign secretary of the Academy.

CLIGGETT: Pugwash?

SCUDDER: Pugwash, yeah, it was just because the first conference was held in a place called Pugwash, but they were known as Pugwash Conferences. These were the conferences with brought Russian scientists into the international framework. Gilbert White was very important here with International Council -- ICSU, International Council of Scientific Unions; SCOPE, Special Committee on Problems of the Environment. These were international organizations to bring together scientists from East and West and the National Academy was very heavily involved in this and the Pugwash Conferences in particular, there were a whole series of them in the '60s and '70s and I don't know for how long. But -- and Gilbert White was very active actually at the international level and as I say in -- in 02:54:00ICSU and -- and BOSTIN -- and -- and SCOPE. So, again you see this began to deal with the policy -- again with the po -- we're still talking about the '60s --

CLIGGETT: Hang on -- when you're over there --

SCUDDER: Yeah, you cannot hear me --

CLIGGETT: Yeah.

SCUDDER: That's good actually.

CLIGGETT: Ted gets up perio -- periodically to go find books off of his floor-to-ceiling shelves. He has a moving ladder that slides on bookshelves to reach the top.

[someone knocks on the door]

SCUDDER: Come in.

CLIGGETT: Continuing on.

SCUDDER: Okay. I was looking for a SCOPE report on my shelf but unfortunately, I have a bad habit of not taking down the name of students to whom I give reports to look at and then I never get the damn things back. So, the SCOPE report wasn't there. But again, that is another policy thing that was called Manmade Lakes as Modified Ecosystems where Gilbert White was the senior author and the 02:55:00person who brought together the group as part of the special committee on problems of the environment, an interrational -- international committee and again, there were a bunch of us from different disciplines mainly Gilbert as a geographer and myself as an anthropologist and the others were limnologists, that is water chemists, fisheries biologists concerned with the reservoirs behind large dams and how to deal with them. So, again, fundamental research in relationship to public policy. Okay.

CLIGGETT: Okay. Why don't we start talking a little bit about IDA? I know that this may be pushing through time chronologically a little too quickly but it's nice to talk about kind of content things as well as the chronology.

SCUDDER: Yeah, I think actually the chrono -- chronology takes us up pretty much to the founding of IDA.

CLIGGETT: How did you meet Michael Horowitz and Peter Brokensha? Where -- where were your first crossings and how did this idea --

SCUDDER: David was an old friend, David Brokensha was an old friend --

CLIGGETT: From --

SCUDDER: -- from Berkeley. He had an appointment at Berkeley and then went on down to Santa Barbara and I frankly -- I'm not quite sure when we -- we first met but it was certainly in the '60s --

CLIGGETT: And did you meet him probably through Elizabeth because of her --

SCUDDER: No. No. We co-authored for example in 1968 the first, I guess, sort of 02:57:00general comparative review of resettlement. That was Chapter 3 in a book called Dams in Africa, an Interdisciplinary Study of Manmade Lakes in Africa by Warren -- by W. M. Warren, Mike Warren, and Neville Rubin and it was titled, Resettlement by David Brokensha, Associate Professor of Anthropology University of California and Thayer Scudder, Associate Professor of Anthropology California Institute of Technology. So, David and I were collaborating obviously in the '60s because that was a 1968 thing. Michael Horowitz, I don't think I met Mo before the mid-1970s. The origins of IDA were when the three of us met, I guess, at SfAA meetings in Arizona --

CLIGGETT: Huh.

SCUDDER: -- in -- probably in 1975 -- you -- one can find out whether there was 02:58:00an SfAA meeting in Arizona at that particular time. And I can remember the three of us sitting around the pool --

CLIGGETT: The swimming pool?

SCUDDER: The swimming pool and talking about the importance of an organization which in effect became IDA, the importance of bringing anthropology into the mainstream of policy analysis. At that particular time AID was -- USAID, the Agency for International Development -- and remember we're talking about things -- one -- one trouble with this kind of interview is that you got to check the dates because you're -- you're -- you're -- you're, you know, you're recollecting and sometimes the questions relate to things that you haven't been thinking about for ten or fifteen years and your answers make you sound a little 02:59:00bit arrogant because you're probably giving yourself too much credit for what you're saying but nonetheless, in the -- in the -- in the mid '70s there were individual anthropologists who were showing the relevance of -- of anthropology. Michael Cernea was hired by the World Bank in the mid-1970s. Michael Horowitz had already served as the first anthropologist, I believe, in ID -- in -- in AID's Office of Policy Evaluation. AID was aware of the importance of anthropology in development. Social soundness analysis was coming into AID, that is -- gee, projects have social components in addition to economic components, we better carry out social soundness analysis -- you know, this is something 03:00:00that -- that IMF -- yeah, IMF still doesn't do. I mean, you know, they -- they just look at a situation -- one -- one -- one situation fits all situations from a -- one theory fits all situations and it's applied respective of differences in -- in -- in culture. But AID pioneered social science analysis unlike --

CLIGGETT: How -- how did USAID become aware?

SCUDDER: Michael Horowitz would know that because as I say he was hired and he was based with the Office of Evaluation in Abidjan in the '70s.

CLIGGETT: Do you think Michael Horowitz was one of the first people hired --

SCUDDER: That's right.

CLIGGETT: -- one of the first anthropologists?

SCUDDER: Well no, I wouldn't say one of the first anthropologists. I -- I haven't -- see, all my work in the '60s and the early '70s was at UN agencies. I had had no experience with AID --

CLIGGETT: Okay.

SCUDDER: -- at the time we founded -- founded IDA. But Michael -- well, the good thing was between the four of us -- the three of us [coughs] David Brokensha 03:01:00having been a colonial civil servant and a former district commissioner, in -- in Tanganyika -- Michael having been a former in the Office of Evaluation of AID, and myself having done work with the UN system brought in three people with totally different experiences and I guess we realized that we had those experiences and that we would make a good -- good threesome to -- to start IDA. And -- and AID they said was pioneering social science analysis presumably in part because people like Michael had had -- maybe Michael in particular had had a -- an impact on this just like in the mid '70s Michael Cernea - and we'll talk a little bit about this later on - was having a similar impact on the Bank. But 03:02:00at that time there was no -- no institute run by anthropologists. You see, anthropologists had been involved in missions just like I was involved in the World Bank mission on -- on small-holder agriculture development in Africa but we weren't aware at that time of research institutions run by anthropologists which would then hire engineers and economists and biologists and water chemists and what-have-you to do -- do -- do the work. And so, we felt that the time had come to pioneer this kind of institution which - and we'll be talking about this later on - to get away from the myth that theory and application are -- are two totally different things, to do research -- fundamental research, especially longitudinal research which had major policy implications and where the policy 03:03:00and research -- policy implications came out of major theoretical advances in the field of anthropology and in other fields. So, we all -- and -- and you see David had done his research on Larteh a -- a Guinean settlement in -- uh, in the foothills inland from -- from [Makra] and he had gone back and done revisits there. Michael done -- had been doing quite a bit of research with transhumant pastoralists in West Africa. So, we were all aware of the importance of both areal research and topical research in anthropology and all three of us -- David obviously having been in the colonial civil service and Michael obviously having been with the Office of Evaluation were aware of the policy implications of that 03:04:00information. So, it seemed it must -- that our organization-like idea was an organization waiting to happen and So, we established it in 1976. David has written a bit on the history of it so, you know, as -- when the day comes that -- eehrrr, we'll hit this in a moment [Cliggett chuckling] turn the damn thing off because it --. Sooner or later, of course, one has to write the history of IDA because I think it is unique and I think, you know, within anthropology there is nothing like it. And it's just a tragedy I think that because of a Republican administration and things of this nature that the funding for organizations like IDA have -- have dried up and it's not just the administration, the Republican administration, it's also, of course, the fact 03:05:00that US funding for overseas aid is gone very significantly down.

CLIGGETT: But -- but IDA was a private sector foundation that public sector agencies could hire to do research, is that --

SCUDDER: Well, wait -- wait a minute. It wasn't private sector -- and I'm looking right now, you see, at the Elizabeth Eddy's and Bill Partridge's edited volume on Applied Anthropology in America, second edition, the -- when was the first edition? Maybe in 1987 and it's -- it's interesting, you see, a number of the people we have been talking about, Michael Cernea, The Production of a Social Methodology and so, on -- but this is getting -- this is not too well 03:06:00what we're talking about. IDA was nonprofit --

CLIGGETT: Okay. Right.

SCUDDER: -- and IDA had no connection with any university. It was based in Binghamton because --

CLIGGETT: Nor did it have any connection with government --

SCUDDER: No.

CLIGGETT: -- or funding --

SCUDDER: No.

CLIGGETT: -- but you were an institute getting funding just for pure basic research?

SCUDDER: That's right. That's right. We were setup as a nonprofit organization with headquarters in an office building in downtown Binghamton with our staff able to have an adjunct relationship with SUNY Binghamton where Michael was professor. In fact, it was Michael who built the department in the 1960s. Michael was the only one of the three of us -- David was at UC Santa Barbara, I was at Cal Tech -- Michael wanted to be the executive director of IDA, wanted to 03:07:00be responsible for setting it up and there would've been no IDA without Michael because he is the one who went and got the IRS nonprofit designations --

CLIGGETT: Right.

SCUDDER: -- the office building, played a major role in hiring staff and what-have-you. So, IDA was then founded in the mid '70s and got most of its money initially from AID primarily although I think one of our first contracts was with the Navajo Tribal Council.

CLIGGETT: Uh-huh.

SCUDDER: And I would say that during the '70s and '80 we pioneered the institutional use, not the individual use of anthropologists but the institutional use of anthropology in development.

CLIGGETT: What do you mean institutional use?

SCUDDER: A institution run by anthropologists which actually competed for and 03:08:00received contracts.

CLIGGETT: So, you put out bids to get contracts?

SCUDDER: We got -- we -- we -- we were applied -- we replied to bids --

CLIGGETT: Okay.

SCUDDER: -- put together proposals and won grants some of which were, you know, seven, eight hundred thousand dollars and then put together teams to -- to carry out the bid. To the best of my knowledge that had not been done -- I -- I remember I think at one time the -- the -- American Anthropologist as an organization tried to set up some kind of foundation but I don't think it ever -- ever came off.

CLIGGETT: Yeah. Right.

SCUDDER: And I don't think SfAA had -- has ever actually set up an institution. Certain anthropologists have become incorporated as individuals to do applied anthropology. Right now, Gordon Appleby for example, lives off contracts that he 03:09:00gets primarily from -- from the World Bank. But IDA was an institution, a nonprofit institution --

CLIGGETT: I see.

SCUDDER: -- with a roster of hundreds mainly anthropologists but also, people in other disciplines to carry out topical and areal research anywhere in the world --

CLIGGETT: Uhmhm.

SCUDDER: -- and we are able to -- to -- if -- if linguistic expertise was needed, somebody who could speak Masai, fine, we'd find somebody who'd speak Masai. If topical expertise was needed, fine, we'd find somebody with an anthropological background or had the necessary topical expertise. And -- and so, we were gradually building -- we have -- we still have an excellent li--

[End of Tape 2, Side 2]

[Begin of Tape 3, Side 1]

SCUDDER: -- I don't want to get into a history of IDA now --

CLIGGETT: Okay.

SCUDDER: -- because it would be totally incomplete and -- and -- and would not do credit to -- to the organization because the history in itself [coughs] warrants preparation and -- and -- and several, you know, several tapes and 03:10:00sooner or later it should be done. But we did have a number of very big contracts. I'll just give you two examples, one under David's control and -- and later on when -- when David couldn't complete I took it over, money from UNDP and the World Bank to look at the onchocerciasis control program in West Africa, this is the river blindness control program --

CLIGGETT: Right.

SCUDDER: -- which was one of the most successful -- I mean like the elimination of smallpox. The Oncho program has played a very important role in -- at least temporarily - I would not say eliminating as in the smallpox case - but at least temporarily eliminating river blindness, onchocerciasis, from major river basins throughout West Africa and we got a major grant of hundreds of thousands of 03:11:00dollars to carry out a three-year study -- I think it was 800,000 bucks to carry out a three-year study of settlement -- land settlement in these river basins for policy purposes, to make recommendations as to what government should -- should -- should do to settle these areas as they will be freed of Oncho. Another contract was from AID to -- to give the government advice -- the US government and the Senegal government advice on the implications the Manantali Dam at Mali on a million downstream users in Mauritania and in Senegal. And so, there we launched program which I guess was about 800 -- 900,000 dollars where we put three, one post-doc and two pre-docs into the field under Muneera Salem-Murdock's direction to do a very detailed study of how the communities on 03:12:00the Senegal side which has the majority, used the natural flood regime of the Senegal River for fisheries, flood recession, agriculture, grazing, aquifer recharge for wells, forest products for fuel and building purposes and what-have-you. We proved that once the dam was built it made not just environmental sense but economic sense for the Manantali to release control floods downstream to simulate the natural flood regime to enable the people to continue flood recession agriculture and that this would not be at -- at -- at the economic expense. In fact, the money which would accrue from the fisheries, and the flood recession agriculture, and the grazing, and what-have-you would exceed any money which would be lost by using that water for hydro power generation but not for control releases.

CLIGGETT: And was that recommendation followed?

SCUDDER: Uh, the [sighs] -- it's been accepted by the World Bank, it's been 03:13:00accepted by the government of Senegal, it was not accepted initially by ONBS which was the river basin authority which rotates the chairmanship between the three countries of Mauritania, Mali, and -- and Senegal but the World Bank now is insisting on flood releases as recommended in the IDA study. But the World Bank does not have a very good record of compliance, of gaining compliance after a project -- after a dam project is completed. So, we cannot answer the question. The recommendations may eventually, yes, be implemented but so, far the engineers who are operating the dam have pretty much ignored the advice and 03:14:00they're -- now when they do open the dam and release floods is frequently at the expense of the downstream rivers -- users. That is when their crops are in the ground and the --

CLIGGETT: Right.

SCUDDER: -- then they release waters and flood out their crops and things of this nature. So, compliance is -- is -- is a big problem.

CLIGGETT: So, this gets back to that question of -- if anthropology can impact first planning and then recommendations and policy and policy is developed around the in -- the informed knowledge -- well informed knowledge what happens -- how -- how does anthropology actually have real application and make a difference?

SCUDDER: It is really unfair to put that question upon anthropology because this is a question which relates to any research in any scientific field. I remember when I talked this morning to the environmental engineers at Cal Tech, I was 03:15:00pointing out that the National Academy of Sciences has shown conclusively that it is in the environmental and the economic interest of the dams on the Missouri River to be operated to release a environmental flow downstream which tries to simulate the original regime of the river for purposes of environmental ben -- restoration, recreation, fishing, to what-have-you. But we're dealing with a political economy and the US administration in the previous election, Governor Bush -- governor of Texas at that particular time, said that, no, he was against these environmental flows. Why? Because he was primarily interested in the vote from Missouri which is a downstream state which did not want environmental flows because it would interfere with barge transport and interfere with some agriculture even though the returns from those were much less than the environmental returns and economic returns which would come from the control 03:16:00flows. So, this is a problem that we have in science in general and -- and -- and in the university, in the academy in general of how do you get the results of research which show pretty clear benefits and distributional benefits -- how do you get policy makers and politicians -- policy makers in the World Bank, politicians in the -- in the government like the US to implement those? It's a hell of a problem and it's a problem we face in anthropology, but it faces all of our colleagues in all the other disciplines too. But yes, we have a very good record in analyzing disasters - and I don't mean physical disasters I mean projects which are -- are disasters - we know pretty well why they are disasters but we've also, had some success in influencing policy which has been 03:17:00successful, and we'll be getting onto that later on. Next question?

CLIGGETT: Okay. Well, we keep saying we'll be getting onto that later on can we talk about the Okavango project because it seems to me that's a great success in terms of --

SCUDDER: I think so, I think so.

CLIGGETT: -- and -- and part of what I need to know is how did you become the team leader of these thirteen-interdisciplinary people and how did you come up with those clearly savvy strategies of not having a contract with the government, not having a contract with IUCN but being somehow independent? Can you talk about your -- your strategic designing of that project? How you ended up there?

SCUDDER: Of course, a lot of it was -- was wisdom of hindsight where you can say, you know, after we -- we -- oh, gee, that was intelligent, look at the impact of that [Cliggett chuckling] whereas an actual fact that probably wasn't consciously intended at the time but --

CLIGGETT: Oh.

SCUDDER: -- but one -- one would like to think it is and, of course --

CLIGGETT: I suspect --

SCUDDER: -- as you tell the story time and time again eventually it becomes a conscious intention. [chuckle] The -- the -- I -- I have to say why -- why I was interested in the Okavango. The Okavango historically or prehistorically was part of the Zambezi system. The Okavango used to flow into the Zambezi upstream from Victoria Falls through an area called the Selinda Spillway and it was only in more recent geological times that the Okavango -- that the Selinda Spillway dried up. But in the old days --

CLIGGETT: How old are you talking?

SCUDDER: Oh God, I cannot remember --

CLIGGETT: Like hundred years ago or --

SCUDDER: Oh no-no-no-no, this is tens of thousands of years ago.

CLIGGETT: Okay.

SCUDDER: But when the Okavango was in flood it went through the Selinda Spillway and then the Selinda Spillway went into the Chobe River and then the Chobe River flows into the Zambezi. But now I don't think the -- that's happened for -- for thousands of years or maybe occasionally it's happened in a flood year. But now 03:19:00the Okavango flows into the Okavango Delta which is a earthquake depressed zone and then it flows out of the Okavango into a river called the Boteti which then flows in -- it's -- it's erratic system in the sense that it doesn't exit to the ocean, it goes into a large pan, you know, in North Central Botswana and then dries up So, you have a great big salt pan. The government of Botswana did a very good job in planning its -- what to do with the Okavango. It brought in FAO, the Food and Agricultural Organization of the UN and UN -- with UNDP funding to carry out the study of the Okavango and recommend various ways to use to water -- now this was in the 1970s, shows how small a world is, guess who -- who was the -- the -- the head of that project? Henry Fosbrooke.

CLIGGETT: O-oh, whew.

SCUDDER: So, and then -- and I can remember actually in 1971 I'd had a Land Rover shipped out from London to Cape Town and we picked it up in Cape Town and I also, picked up my two daughters who had flown out and met me there to drive that Land Rover up for our 1971 re-study of the Gwembe project. And on the way, we decided to go through Botswana So, -- not Botswana -- yeah, Botswana so, that we could see Henry Fosbrooke and we saw -- we spent a couple of days with Henry and at that time Henry was running out -- con -- carrying out this study -- carrying out this study, in charge of it, which came up with something like twenty options for the use of the waters of the Okavango. Now, you better realize that in the 1970s every felt that waters which exited to the ocean or in the Okavango case went into a salt pan, were wasted.

CLIGGETT: Right.

SCUDDER: -- or at best they said, well, these are just for crocodiles and 03:21:00hippos. I can remember a very famous geographer who said that about the Okavango, this water should be used, it should be transported to Johannesburg and places like this.

CLIGGETT: Uh-huh.

SCUDDER: So, Henry's study came up with something like twenty proposals for utilizing the Okavango waters and to the government's credit they picked the least environmental damaging one called SOIWDP, the Southern Okavango Integrated Water Development Project. And [coughs] they then brought in then a -- a good international firm, the Snowy Mountains Firm from Snowy Mountains, Australia, engineering firm to do the feasibility studies. In those days unfortunately, the same firm that did the design for the dams also, carried out the environmental impact assessment. So, you can imagine the --

CLIGGETT: Yes.

SCUDDER: -- the implications of that.

CLIGGETT: Put their interest.

SCUDDER: So, of course, Snowy Mountains decided that, yes, yes, very much the dam was -- the project was very much in the interest of the government and the 03:22:00environmental costs were not particularly serious and the local people would benefit from it. And the project briefly [coughs] -- if you look at the Okavango it's just like a huge wedge which -- this big delta, oh say, five -- five thousand square kilometers in size, part of which is permanently flooded, part of it seasonably flooded, and part of it is grasslands which are occasionally flooded, and part of which are islands which are not flooded at all. And the reason why it's shaped sort of like a wedge is that there is a fault zone which causes the bottom of it, called the Thamalakene Fault -- in fact there are two faults, the Canary Fault and the Thamalakene Fault and that's where it stops and So, the water all drains down through this fault and then exits, you know, through a whole series of tributaries but it's -- it's a relatively shallow basin and through time water will sometimes exit on the northern -- through a 03:23:00northern tributary, Sometimes through a southern tributary till the Lake Ngami and at the moment through the Boro which is a central tributary. And that central tributary drains into the Thamalakene River named after the Thamalakene Fault, the river is in the fault zone, and then it exits through another river, very large river which is seasonal called the Boteti which eventually goes into the pan. So, what the government wanted to do was this program, the Southern Okavango Innovative Water Development Project was to first of all channelize the Boro. In other words, straighten the channel, deepen the channel to get more water to flow into the Thamalakene.

CLIGGETT: And make it the consistent exit?

SCUDDER: Yeah. And then they wanted to build a dam at the top of the Boteti so, they would build up a huge supply of water in that dam which they could then release down the Boteti where they would now have another dam further downstream and from that dam would be a pipeline to the diamond mines, the -- the diamond 03:24:00mines -- there were two diamond mines there, Orappa and Letlhakane which produced about 50 percent of the diamonds in Botswana and Botswana -- 80 percent of Botswana's foreign exchange in those days came from diamond mining. So, in other words, by far and above the most - like copper in Zambia, copper 80 percent foreign exchange, okay - the diamond mines the same in Botswana. So, clearly there was a relationship between the project and the diamond mines because it's interesting that the project was initiated in the 1980s, the -- the planning for the project was initiated in the 19 -- when there was a serious drought and there had been a small dam put on the Boteti to full up a reservoir called the Mopipi Reservoir from which water was channeled to -- to the diamond mines and that reservoir dried up -- remember the droughts we had in the Middle 03:25:00Zambezi Valley in the '80s? Well, that reservoir dried up and it is interesting, and I don't think not coincidental that the decision to -- to -- to start this planning for these dams and reservoirs was at the time that the water supply for the diamond mines had dried up. Meanwhile the diamond mines being rather desperate had begun doing -- looking for water in the aquifer and had actually found enough water in the aquifer but meanwhile the planning for the project went on ahead. So, once the decision was made in the early '90s to build the dam there was this environmental uproar and also, an uproar from -- as I said --

CLIGGETT: Wait a minute, the dam that was -- they decided to build the dam in the 1990s the one that was planned from --

SCUDDER: Yeah.

CLIGGETT: -- the '70s?

SCUDDER: No-no, not from the '70s --

CLIGGETT: Okay.

SCUDDER: -- no, from the '70s --

CLIGGETT: That was that small -- the least --

SCUDDER: Well, the '70s there were twenty studies --

CLIGGETT: Right.

SCUDDER: In the mid '80s Snowy Mountains picked the one of those studies which 03:26:00was the least environmental --

CLIGGETT: Right.

SCUDDER: -- damaging and said, this is the project --

CLIGGETT: And they carried it out?

SCUDDER: -- which makes the most -- well, the plan was to carry it out.

CLIGGETT: Okay.

SCUDDER: When the contractors to build the dam -- the first dam, to do the channelization of the -- of the Boro and to build the first dam near -- on the Boteti, the upstream dam, the bulldozers actually arrived --

CLIGGETT: I see.

SCUDDER: -- the safari operators and the local people and the environmental community objected and they demanded that the minister of water affairs come and when they came they insulted him and they told him to commit suicide and about a thousand people -- it was the largest political opposition in Botswana since independence over this project. Now, of course, the government blamed it all on outside agitators, you see --

CLIGGETT: Right.

SCUDDER: -- and they blamed it on the environmental movement and they blamed it 03:27:00on the safari companies which actually did truck the people in and they said, you know, people have been duped and this is a good project and we should go ahead with it. And so, -- but meanwhile it had come to a -- to a stop and the contractors had to withdrew and what-have-you. So, they were all ready to start. So, it was then that the government contacted IUCN -- well now, first of all the government did something which to me is still inconceivable. They first of all contacted Greenpeace because they were so, convinced that this was a good project they contacted Greenpeace and they said, come in and take a look at it, it's a good project, you know. And then I -- I think it was naivety. I think they would assume that, you know, well, all we have to do is get Greenpeace to say it's a good project and then we'll go ahead with it. Actually, Greenpeace came in and wrote a fairly moderate report.

CLIGGETT: Whew.

SCUDDER: I mean they -- they -- they -- they were good in the sense that they -- you know, you -- you thought this through very carefully, you tried to pick the least environmental damaging project but no, it's not a good project. Well, of 03:28:00course, the government didn't believe that and so, then they contacted IUCN.

CLIGGETT: What time is this? What date are we talking here?

SCUDDER: 1970 -- 19 -- excuse me, 1990-1991.

CLIGGETT: Okay.

SCUDDER: They then contacted IUCN [coughs] -- no, we have to go back a little bit with IUCN. When IUCN was first founded there was an idea of founding it under the UN system in effect as sort of a -- a prior United Nations environmental program -- unit.

CLIGGETT: Right.

SCUDDER: But I guess the decision was made: no, it should remain independent, but we'll put it in Switzerland. And so, its headquarters is in Gland, Switzerland --

CLIGGETT: Okay.

SCUDDER: -- on -- on Lake Geneva and it's a membership organization as I said with hundreds of -- of -- of environmental agencies and governments including Botswana -- the government of Botswana is a member of IUCN. So, -- and it's -- it's known for its objectivity and it's known for good research. So, IUCN was 03:29:00then asked by the government of Botswana - well, Greenpeace was just there for a couple of weeks - and did a quick and dirty, please, come in and do a very thorough one-year evaluation of this project. And the IUCN headquarters said okay, it will come under our wetlands and water resources component of -- of IUCN and [inaudible] who is in charge of that was a very good biologist by the name of Patrick Dugan who coincidentally had invited me to come to an IUCN workshop a couple of years previous to that at which I had talked about the importance of environmental flows and the economic and ecological and environmental costs of big dams and things of this nature and the -- I had 03:30:00written in 1980 actually -- and again, you see, this is in -- this is interesting, this is how you can do something and then ten years later you find out that it was a pioneering concept and it is having policy implications and you don't have a clue -- I mean Elizabeth and I didn't have a clue that our resettlement work would be more important than any other research for the World Bank's guidelines on resettlement. We'll get to that later on when we discuss Michael Cernea's role in the World Bank and -- and -- and the relationship of that to our research. Well, it's the same thing, in 1980 I did a -- an article or a chapter in David Harris's book on the Human Ecology of Savanna Environments which I think he tucks pretty much towards the back of the book -- uh, on River Basin Development in Africa Savannas in which I was saying, you know, people who 03:31:00are studying Africa tend to forget that there are huge rivers there and they look just at climate zones and vegetation zones rather than the implications of these huge rivers that pass through these zones and that -- if you manage these rivers properly including if you build dams environmental flows from these dams that these can have very huge -- well, first of all I look at the negative impacts of river basin development on local populations, The Socio-economic Effects of River Basin Development on Local Populations. And then -- then The Development from Above Syndrome and The Myth of the Conservative Peasant, see, these are all anthropological concepts --

CLIGGETT: Yes.

SCUDDER: -- this is 1980. And then -- then looking at The Socio-Economic Rationality and Dynamism of Local Systems of Land and Water Use. [coughs] And then putting it all together, a Scenario for Dam Construction Beneficial to Local Populations, controlled floods, 1980. Now, this is quoted as the first 03:32:00comparative -- I mean controlled floods had been suggested for individual dams, but this manifest was the first argument which said that this should be a consideration for all dams built in the tropics because of the importance of fisheries and down streams and so, on. So, you know, I'm very pleased with that but I didn't have a clue at the time that I wrote it that -- that this would then become, you know, sort of a -- sort -- it -- it's one of the things I'm proudest of, but the point I'm trying to make is that you can do something and fifteen and twenty years later it can have an impact or it can't have an impact as -- as -- as the case may be. Anyhow, [coughs] this was 1980. Pat Dugan at IUCN was aware of my writings on -- on this kind of thing and so, he gave me a ring -- he called me up and he said, you know, would you be willing to head up 03:33:00this -- this study? And I said, No. He called me on a Friday and I said, Look, it takes a year, I'll have to take a year off from Cal Tech. He wanted to start right away. He called me up I think in May or June to start the following September of '91.

CLIGGETT: Uh-huh.

SCUDDER: [coughs] And then I thought about it over the weekend and I said, you idiot, you know, you 've always wanted to -- you never visited the Okavango. You heard it's one of the most beautiful wetlands in the world and the reason this is, is that it's not like the Sud -- in the Sudan, it's not a giant swamp full of water and papyrus. It has hundreds of little islands --

CLIGGETT: Yeah.

SCUDDER: -- and all of these islands have all different kinds of vegetations and is full of wildlife and lions swim from one island to another and hippopotamuses are in them between and there are lechwe leaping around in the water and the sitatunga and this and that and the other and the bird life, over 400 species and So, on.

CLIGGETT: Yeah. That's right.

SCUDDER: And so, I rang him on Monday and I said, have you gotten anybody to -- 03:34:00to head up the study yet? And he said, No, not yet. And I said, Okay, I'll do it.

CLIGGETT: And you said no initially because --

SCUDDER: Well, because --

CLIGGETT: -- too soon, too long --

SCUDDER: -- well, it was -- it was -- you know, I -- I would have to get a leave of absence. My courses had already been --

CLIGGETT: Scheduled.

SCUDDER: -- if not -- they'd certainly been scheduled, they may not have been published yet in the -- in the catalogue. I had already pol -- told Molly that, you know, I wasn't going to go back to Africa for another year in the 1990s because, see, I'd been -- the previous studies, a year in the '50s - Molly hadn't gone there - a year in the '60s, a year in the '70s, a year in the '80s, I didn't really plan to spend a year in the '90s going back to -- to the Tonga. Now, this was going to be pretty close to a year in the Okavango but then I -- and then I said, you know, it's just -- it's just -- you cannot resist it. So, then faxes had come into existence -- now, you see, I had about three months to put this thing together and faxes -- the fax machine had just, you know, become 03:35:00a thing -- without the fax machine I don't think we could've put together a team. And Patrick came up with about six of the people and I came up with -- or maybe Patrick came up with seven and I came up with the other -- other six and we had to have -- I was the leader. There were no -- we had no deputy but -- but two of us were pretty much out there the whole time [coughs], myself, I went out there in September and stayed except for a brief period in March when I came home to write the first draft of this 532-page report single-space -- I was there for nine months about and Ron Manley who was a civil engineer and 03:36:00hydrologist recommended by Patrick Dugan and he became the deputy director. Ron [Coley], Canadian - Manley is British - Ron [Coley] Canadian, he was the chief engineer responsible for Ducks Unlimited Canada, you know, for making all of these special areas for -- for -- for -- for -- for Duck Refugees in Canada. R. K. Davis, he was a economist from Colorado. Jim Green was a biologist from the United Kingdom. Jeff Howard was a biologist from Australia who worked for IUCN in their Kenya office. Steve Lawry was a social scientist, American. Dave Martz was a computer engineer and civil engineer who did our data -- data -- data -- 03:37:00data management, Canadian. Peter Rogers was a professor of engineering, civil engineering and regional planning at Harvard. Taylor was a biologist from UK. Steve Turner was a geographer. Gilbert White was our senior adviser and E. P. Wright was the head of the -- retired head of the British hydro geological service. So, we had hydro geologists, we had engineers, we had all kinds of sociologists --

CLIGGETT: Are these all people that you had known at all?

SCUDDER: No-no, I didn't know any of these guys. I said I recommended four of these -- see, I recommended Davis --

CLIGGETT: Because you had known them, or you knew their work?

SCUDDER: They -- or -- or they'd been recommended to me by colleagues I'd contacted. I mean for example, the economist I wanted was a chap by the name of Chuck Howe --

CLIGGETT: How -- okay. Let -- So, let me ask this question, how did you know 03:38:00that you would be able to work together or what did you do to make sure in the process of beginning the team that you could work together?

SCUDDER: Well now -- okay, before we get to that let me just see -- Davis -- I had re -- recommended Howe -- Howe wasn't -- incidentally [coughs] this project was sufficiently interesting that these are good people and none of the ones that we contacted turned us down --

CLIGGETT: Uh-huh.

SCUDDER: -- with one exception and that was Chuck Howe, the economist at the University of Colorado because he already was -- got some kind of fellowship and was going to Europe and So, he recommended Jim Davis and so, I was responsible for getting hold of Davis. Jeff Howard, both of us knew because he had been a professor of biology at the University of Zambia and I'd known -- he had been director of the Kafue Basin survey. Steve Lawry was my contact through a friend of mine, Jonathan Jenness. Peter Rogers had been on a number of panels that I 03:39:00had chaired for the National Academy of Sciences dealing with the Gambia River in -- evaluation of the University of Michigan study on the Gambia River and I has asked Peter Rogers to be on that and the Jubba River in Somalia and I had asked Peter Rogers to be on that So, I knew -- knew Rogers. Steve Turner, I had worked with in Lesotho and, of course, Gilbert White had been my -- been my mentor. So, [coughs] seven of these people were -- were -- including my -- from -- well, came from -- from Pat Dugan and five of them plus myself were people I had known all picked because of their international standing in their fields. The government had required that nobody could have recently studied the Okavango in the team. Now, they -- they -- they were really going a little bit absurd in 03:40:00terms of the priorities -- well, in terms -- in terms of how they -- they didn't want any local expertise. We -- we got around that in the way I mention in a little while except that Steve Turner who was one of the most valuable members of the team, geographer, he is married to a -- a Mosotho from Lesotho -- Lesotho who -- and -- and he speaks fluent Sotho and Sotho is a related language to Tswana and he speaks fluent Tswana. So, we had a member of the team who speak fluent Tswana but the way we set it up was that Manley and I would be there full time and then we would only bring these people in periodically, but we'd bring them all in together and so, twice we brought them all in for maybe, you know, a 03:41:00couple of weeks or a month and one or two of them were in there for even a little bit longer. So, it was Manley and I who in effect -- we had a house in -- Manley was based in Gaborone and we had a house there so, that he could interact with the Department of Water Affairs as hydrologist and engineer and I was based in Maun actually in the Okavango so, I could deal with the situation there and -- and -- and organize the research.

CLIGGETT: And the rest of the team came in twice --

SCUDDER: Twice, yeah.

CLIGGETT: -- all together? Did any of them come individually?

SCUDDER: Well, occasionally we would have one stay over, for example, Davis on the economics. We needed a little bit more work there and so, he was there a bit for -- for his -- Gilbert White never was able to come because his -- he had retired from the Institute of Behavioral Science at the University of Colorado but there was a hiatus and they were without a director after he had retired and 03:42:00So, he was asked to be a temporary director until they got a new director. But he remained -- well, he's one of the authors and he remained as adviser and, of course, he read and critiqued, the -- the book and what-have-you. So, it was Ron and I then who met with -- with the government and why we had a memorandum of understanding as opposed to a contract, was that because we were very intelligent and didn't want to have the government have any control over us or is that just wisdom of -- I -- I can't remember.

CLIGGETT: And -- and can you explain what the difference in that was?

SCUDDER: Well, with a contract you're beholding at -- to the organization that contracts you and you can't --

CLIGGETT: Because they are paying you?

SCUDDER: Yeah -- and you can't release your reports. If I have a contract with 03:43:00the World Bank --

CLIGGETT: Uh-huh.

SCUDDER: -- I have to sign a contract saying that every -- all my data belongs to them --

CLIGGETT: I see.

SCUDDER: -- and I cannot release any report without their approval.

CLIGGETT: Uh-huh.

SCUDDER: But without a con -- with -- with a memorandum of understanding -- it may -- it may have been Patrick Dugan actually who -- who had insisted on this, as -- as I said I cannot remember. But we -- certainly we knew the difference between a contract and a memorandum of understanding. We knew a memorandum of understanding was in -- in our interest because it would mean we had complete independence from IUCN and complete independence from the government.

CLIGGETT: And yet, they paid for everything?

SCUDDER: [coughs] No, this was one of these complicated things. IUCN is like the organi -- like the World Bank, they don't have much money and so, they're dependent on the organization which they work for, in this case the government of Botswana paying for part of the study but then they have to get donors and So, the main funders of the -- of our research was the government of Sweden, the 03:44:00government of Norway, and the government of Botswana, and then IUCN paid for me. So, all the rest of the money came from Sweden, Norway, and so, for example, I would periodically go to the -- to the Swedish Embassy and to the Norwegian Embassy to, you know, tell them what was going on.

CLIGGETT: It seems like a pretty amazing arrangement that --

SCUDDER: It was.

CLIGGETT: -- this both -- both the government of Botswana and the IUCN would contract with you people without an official contract that -- but this memorandum --

SCUDDER: Oh, no, the memorandum of understanding was official.

CLIGGETT: I understand that but --

SCUDDER: But no -- no, they did try to have -- maintain control over us --

CLIGGETT: Yes.

SCUDDER: -- I -- I've mentioned that. So, you know, we started this study and come January the first group of engineers and all -- everybody came out in January and then we also, had the money to have both Ron Manley and Ron [Coley], our two civil engineers, have to go to Australia to meet with the Snowy 03:45:00Mountains people --

CLIGGETT: Uh-huh.

SCUDDER: -- who had already completed the study and then gone back to Australia, you see, the feasibility studies to build the dam --

CLIGGETT: Right.

SCUDDER: -- [coughs] So, they went to Australia and -- and talked to them and all of our engineers said that the designs were excellent --

CLIGGETT: Uh-huh.

SCUDDER: -- and so, I would say in December there was no decision that the project was bad but by March -- there may have been a few people who were a little bit still hesitant but by March -- what we did we was, we divided the area - this was -- this was me primarily - I divided the area into -- I can't remember whether it was nine or ten sections, you know, the Okavango itself and then along the Thamalakene and then the Boteti and then we did an analysis of the costs and benefits for the local population in those nine or eleven 03:46:00sections. And we found out that rather than the government having said that the local people would benefit overwhelmingly the local ben -- the local people would disbenefit, that the costs were greater to the local people than the benefits. Edmond Wright, the hydro geologist meanwhile had gone down and spent a lot of time wandering -- he was out there for a long time actually, Edmond was, because he had to go and check all of the studies that the diamond mines had done on terms of -- of the -- of the aquifer resources and he established -- yes, they had enough water, they didn't need the project, they had enough. Now, the government was -- was saying that the project wasn't necessary for the diamond mines, they were saying, we want the project because it's the best use for the water because it is in the interest of the local people --

CLIGGETT: Right.

SCUDDER: -- and it's in the interest of Maun. Maun is the regional center there which is growing very, very rapidly --

CLIGGETT: Right.

SCUDDER: -- and has a big water problem. So, what we have to do is, one, is it interest -- in the interest of the local people, if not, what is -- what would we recommend? So, we didn't just evaluate the project. When we decided that the 03:47:00project should be terminated we then presented what we call the IUCN preferred -- well, first of all, we had a no-project offer alternative, said there is no project. So, the economists did that and then the IUCN preferred alternative -- how many pages was that? See, the IUCN preferred alternative was over a hundred pages. So, we came up with an option which would benefit the local people, a whole bunch of sub-projects and what-have-you. Then we looked at the mines and we said, nope, the mines don't need the water. And then we looked at Maun and we came to the conclusion that the conjunctive use of surface water from the annual flood and groundwater if properly surveyed we were convinced would meet the present and the future needs of Maun. So, putting all of these things together 03:48:00we said, no, the project shouldn't -- it should be -- it should be terminated. So, for the reasons I mentioned --

CLIGGETT: So, from January till March there was enough research and --

SCUDDER: Our research, yeah --

CLIGGETT: -- you had all moved forward into --

SCUDDER: Yeah, by March we had pretty much decided that the -- the project was a no go.

CLIGGETT: And you were all coming up with this -- this perspective pretty independently based on --

SCUDDER: Well, I would bring them all together and we would sit around the table in -- in the hotel in -- in -- in -- in Maun. My management style is to give everybody I'm dealing with maximum freedom because they got the expertise. It was just like with the Gwembe project. Elizabeth and I don't bug you and in fact we probably bugged you and Sam and Ronda too little telling you God dammit go--

CLIGGETT: [inaudible]

SCUDDER: -- out there and do the basic stuff --

CLIGGETT: I've been bugged sufficiently, thank you. [chuckle]

SCUDDER: But -- but no, my management style is -- is -- is to be -- is to 03:49:00delegate. Nonetheless, when we're all sitting there and -- and the engineers are coming up and saying, these -- well, these are good designs and what-have-you, each person has got to justify to the whole group what they think and as we kicked this stuff around pretty much by March we came to the conclusion that the benefits that were being claimed were not there and the costs were being underestimated. Alright now, prior to that time - this is why it was a good thing we had a memorandum of understanding - prior to that IUCN had one of his annual meetings in Australia and at that time the director of Greenpeace or somebody high up in Greenpeace had told the guys at IUCN that, look guys if you guys come up with approval of this project, man, we're going to lay into you.

CLIGGETT: God

SCUDDER: And so, I got a telephone call from Gland -- oh, and this project was so, important to IUCN that they wouldn't let their regional representative who 03:50:00was based in Gaborone, a Swiss -- a Swiss couple -- they wouldn't let them be our supervisors. Our supervisor was Peter -- Patrick Dugan in Gland. So, Patrick calls up and he says, well, IUCN is a little bit worried about this and they want to do what the National Academy of Science does, they want the report -- our report to be vetted by a committee of old fogeys - gosh, I shouldn't say that - but by a committee of -- of senior people who had been brought together to look at our -- at our report before it was released. It took me about thirty seconds to say, Patrick, IUCN can definitely require that, we don't really have any control over that, but I'll be on the first plane back to California. You got to be tough sometimes.

CLIGGETT: Uhmhmn.

SCUDDER: And we never heard anything more from that. But that was -- that was -- that was risky and -- and, you know, he could very well have said, well, okay -- I mean -- but -- but, you know, I said more than that, I said, Look, this is the 03:51:00best team I've ever served on. No group of peers that you're going to put together will have the knowledge about this project that we do. So, any verdict that they come up with will not be as good as our verdict, it will be strictly based on politics and -- and, you know, concerns that IUCN have alienated the government of Botswana and this and that and the other thing, I said, if you really want a good evaluation you've got to leave it to us and if you don't we quit.

CLIGGETT: Uhmhm. So, it seems like, I think, a big part of the success of your ability to be heard or to construct the team and to come with a fairly objective report had to do with the authority and the name that you had made for yourself 03:52:00during your career. Not anybody would've been able to say --

SCUDDER: I think that's correct.

CLIGGETT: -- the team --

SCUDDER: Jaap van Velsen and you never met Jaap -- you know, he was director of the Rhodes-Livingston Institute at one time, one of his greatest contributions, I think, to -- to anthropology and social science was the emphasis he put on situational analysis.

CLIGGETT: Yes.

SCUDDER: You got to look at each situation and my reputation is based on the fact that I am not pro dam or anti dam. I try to look at each project as objectively as possible - we all have our biases, but I try to control my biases - and come up with a rounded assessment of does this makes sense or does it not? And in this case, we had a team of thirteen experts covering all the necessary fields and we came to the conclusion it doesn't make any sense.

CLIGGETT: And somehow you believed that those other twelve individuals were as being as objective as you would --

SCUDDER: No way of knowing that. Remember, I had on the team four engineers, 03:53:00Martz, yeah, [Coley], Rogers, and Manley, yeah, four engineers and engineers are -- are, you know, not known for worrying too much about environmental and social cultural impacts but -- but these were all good engineers and good scientists. Rogers was, you know, professor at Harvard and the others were all practicing engineers private sector who were willing to listen. They -- none of them were recommended by Patrick Dugan -- all of them were recommended by Patrick Dugan because he knew that they were able to think objectively. So, that was very, very important.

CLIGGETT: Do you think that part of your designing of the team the way you did and the way the designing of having team members come and spend a chunk of time 03:54:00together for periods of time was that a different kind of methodology than what -- they would've been employed on their own and it partly the anthropological management style --

SCUDDER: I would not say that our management style was any better than any other. To a large extent it was based on the availability -- see, these were very busy people --

CLIGGETT: Uh-huh.

SCUDDER: -- and only Manley and I could be there all the time --

CLIGGETT: Uh-huh.

SCUDDER: -- So, then the only decision that Manley and I had to make was, well, do we want them to come one at a time -- well, no that's not a good idea because what we do if their difference is of opinion? So, let's bring them out on two major occasions when we have as many of them as there as possible.

CLIGGETT: For about two weeks?

SCUDDER: For two or three or four weeks. Well, we mulled this all over and -- turn this thing off for a second now -- mull this all over and see if we can come up to a collective decision.

CLIGGETT: Where are you trying to get --

SCUDDER: -- So, that was crucial.

CLIGGETT: But part of it -- what I'm thinking is that maybe having people like 03:55:00engineers who might not do the fieldwork the way that -- that anthropologists do fieldwork but bringing engineers out and doing fieldwork more in the anthropological style might have engaged them more --

SCUDDER: Here is my mom -- here is -- yeah, here we are getting --

CLIGGETT: What are you showing me now?

SCUDDER: Oh, I'm -- I'm -- not meant to be showing you, they -- they just happened to be there -- this is Laos.

CLIGGETT: [chuckle] Pictures of children and rafting in Laos. I'd rather turn the tape off --

SCUDDER: Here -- here -- here is -- here is the great anthropologist.

CLIGGETT: Okay.

SCUDDER: I [inaudible] you turn the tape of, yeah, turn the tape of.

CLIGGETT: Okay, turning the tape of. Okay, we're back on after Ted showed me a few pictures of the fieldwork in Botswana and Laos and a few other places. But in that conversation Ted talked a little bit about kind of the cleverness of knowing who to hire to get around certain kinds of political issues and so, Ted 03:56:00I'd like you to kind of state that in a way that --

SCUDDER: Yeah, in -- in -- on the Okavango case understandably the government wanted to reduce the bias in the team So, that it didn't want to have people who had done research in the Okavango because it assumed that they would be pro Okavango or anti Okavango before they even arrived on the team. So, we got around this problem by hiring local Botswana colleagues to help us to give us the necessary local expertise and we emphasized two types. One was a type who could actually show us the Okavango. So, there was a local person - I think he was retired at that time - Pete Smith who was considered to be the most knowledgeable about the Okavango in general. He had been there since the 1950s. He had worked for the Department of Water Affairs. He had worked for the 03:57:00Department of Agriculture. He was considered to be the leading botanist knowing the vegetation of the area and things of this nature. And so, we -- we -- we hired Pete as a consultant and for example, Pete took Ron Manley and I by boat --

[End of Tape 3, Side 1]

[Begin of Tape 3, Side 2]

CLIGGETT: So, Pete took you completely through the [inaudible]?

SCUDDER: Yeah, he took us by boat. We -- we picked up a boat on one of the -- one of the promontories of dry land which went out into the delta and then traveled all the way up to the -- where the Okavango River flows into the delta and then came all the way back down again. It would -- took -- took several days. So, Pete was our -- our local expert. Then from the point of view of 03:58:00getting government expertise we hired as a local consultant the head -- [Inagnane] who was the head of land-use planning in the Ministry of Agriculture and he accompanied us on a number of trips. Then we hired the former chief ranger of the Moremi Wildlife Reserve was the big wildlife reserve which juts into the Okavango and so, we hired him to help us on the wildlife side. Then an area of economics which we didn't know enough about and -- and our economist Davis didn't know enough about was the whole issue of -- of marketing and bringing services to local populations and so, a South African, Norman Reynolds we recruited to come up and advise us on that. So, we were able to rec -- bring into our team -- and the government actually did -- did object in general to 03:59:00this idea but we explained to them why it was important and --

CLIGGETT: How did they express their objections?

SCUDDER: Well, they were worried -- they -- I think -- I think, you know, they were ambivalent about the study. I mean they would've rather to go ahead with the project --

CLIGGETT: Yeah.

SCUDDER: -- and not have these kinds of studies and I think they were on the one hand worried that if we brought local experts they would have their biases pro or anti and they had to approve, you know, each one of these people. And I think in the case of Norman Reynolds, yeah, they wouldn't allow Norman to come to -- to Botswana. So, we just had to have Norman -- we -- we -- I had to explain to Norman what the situation is and he came up with the theory of -- he has very interesting theories about how you bring social services to local people through markets --

CLIGGETT: I see.

SCUDDER: -- through a in effect a series of concentric markets where in a -- in a particular area have a market once a week and then in the next area have a 04:00:00market somewhere else --

CLIGGETT: Yeah. Right.

SCUDDER: -- and those markets would present -- government officials must be present instead of having to go Siavonga to get your national registration card --

CLIGGETT: Right. Right.

SCUDDER: -- the government DO or what-have-you will come to that market and can give national registration cards out. The credit people come to that market and you can get your credit there without going to the capital and finding that [inaudible] and this kind of thing So, that's all in there as part of the IUCN alternative, you see. So, we had Norman write up a section on -- on -- on that. This is the importance of having, I think, social scientists running this kind of thing who have -- anthropologists we -- you know, let's face it --

CLIGGETT: Exactly.

SCUDDER: -- we have a total -- we have a total view -- what other science fields can get grants from the National Endowment of Humanities? The Social Science Research Council, the National Science Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, you name it --

CLIGGETT: Rockefeller probably [inaudible] --

SCUDDER: -- the same person can put in applications to everyone and why? Because 04:01:00certain aspects of our work deal with the totality of human relationship in relationship to whatever context that human population is dealing with.

CLIGGETT: As -- as you're describing the functioning of this project I'm imagining a very different picture if an engineer had been put in charge of the project and bringing the team together and setting up the style --

SCUDDER: They would've been looking primarily at how good was the design? Would it been able to deal with a fifty-year flood?

CLIGGETT: And they may have been induced to include a few social scientists but from my experience they're often brought in under those circumstances to get the local color, the -- the -- you know, textural -- the -- the pretty stories that illustrate --

SCUDDER: And this is why we set up IDA, you see, is we wanted to set up IDA as a institution which would have an awareness of the importance of this totality of looking at people within global context and then bringing in whoever is 04:02:00necessary to deal with specific aspects of the interaction between that population and -- and the context, the situational analysis that Jaap van Velsen was talking about.

CLIGGETT: Yeah.

SCUDDER: Now, we also, -- of course, once we came to the conclusion that the project a no-go we had to tell the government because, you see, in talking to our engineers and what-have-you the government looked -- thought up until January that we were going to pull the project and say, yes, good project and we'd willing to go out and -- and vouch for it which we would've been if we come to the conclusion it was a good project because I think there are Some good dam projects and there are some bad ones and there are some ones which are questionable. So, we then went to the government and said, look, it's a no-go. And that was on a Friday and we gave them the report, the draft of the report. And immediately, you know, they contacted us and said, no-no-no-no, you can't -- 04:03:00you can't publish this, you cannot do anything with this, the minister is out of the country and you got to wait until the minister comes back and -- and, you know, Ron and I said, Look, we've got to make our minds up on this, So, we -- we had already come to the conclusion that we weren't going to have the government publish it. We had already found a private publisher in Gaborone which we had not told anybody about so, the draft report was already out.

CLIGGETT: It was already in the process of being published when you presented it to the government?

SCUDDER: Yeah. Yeah, we submitted to the government this -- what's the day on this? -- oh no, this was -- this was October '92 -- this was in effect the second draft -- and this was the final report -- that was October '92 -- uh, and this is 1993. So, we presented to the government an early draft or maybe an 04:04:00executive summary, I cannot remember exactly whether or not we just had an executive summary and they were saying, well, no-no-no-no you can't do this and I'm -- we're saying, well, we're sorry. So, we worked out a compromise. We said, Look, we're giving this public lecture on Friday. Oh, no-no, you cannot do that.

CLIGGETT: A week from the day you're --

SCUDDER: A week -- a week from that and I -- I said, I'm sorry, uh, it's our decision and you -- you don't have any control over this. What we'll do is that we'll give you the report - yeah, So, it was -- it was a draft report - we can give you the report on Monday or you can give it to the parliament so, the parliament can see it on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday but then we'll go ahead and announce our conclusions on Friday. So, you see, IUCN at one time wanted to oversee the report and -- and the government at one time, you know, wanted to -- to try to influence it and on both cases, we said, Sorry.

CLIGGETT: And in that moment, in that week-long period from when you said, here is the summary report and we think the project is a bad one --

SCUDDER: A lot of pressure.

CLIGGETT: Yes, so, how did you handle that? What -- what was that week like in your --

SCUDDER: Not much fun.

CLIGGETT: What did you do? What was happening? Telephone calls?

SCUDDER: Telephone calls from the government --

CLIGGETT: Threats?

SCUDDER: -- no-no, press -- press wouldn't know -- So, we -- none press had come in -- the press didn't know what was going on -- this was all hush-hush and what-have-you --

CLIGGETT: Push --

SCUDDER: -- So, we just told the government on Friday and IUCN -- we told the government and IUCN.

CLIGGETT: Surely the government could've had people coming to your house and hassling you.

SCUDDER: They knew us pretty well. Remember, we'd been there October -- this was -- this was M -- when did we give the lecture? I can't remember -- May this was -- yeah, March through May -- oh yeah, So, what's -- what's the date on that?

CLIGGETT: October --

SCUDDER: Okay.

CLIGGETT: -- October '92.

SCUDDER: No, our lecture was in May I think. It was just not much fun. Maybe I went -- maybe I took off and went up to the Okavango, I -- I can't remember -- I don't think -- I think Ron and I stayed around but we were under a lot of pressure.

CLIGGETT: Did you feel insecure? Did you feel --

SCUDDER: No. No, no, we didn't think anything would happen to us, no-no. We didn't worry about physical safety, no, no, no, no, in no way. Although, you know, when the project was terminated of course they then had to pay off the contractors -- I think they had to pay them one third of the project cost and this was something like what was a very expensive project -- I can't remember what the cost was, but it was very expensive and so, the government lost well over -- I mean they lost tens of millions of dollars --

CLIGGETT: In paying to have this--.

SCUDDER: In -- in paying -- you know, all -- they already had contracts to build the project, you see --

CLIGGETT: I see.

SCUDDER: -- So, they had to pay off the engineers for bringing in their equipment and for the time lost and for being ready to continue it and this that and the other thing.

CLIGGETT: And paid -- and they contributed a portion of the cost for the research?

SCUDDER: Well, that was very -- very small, of course. Oh yeah, sure, the previous --

CLIGGETT: [inaudible]

SCUDDER: -- sure the project preparation. Now, what's happened since then [coughs] there were -- and -- and this kind of thing is kind of fun actually --

CLIGGETT: Oh, wait a minute -- So, you haven't told us what happened just before --

SCUDDER: Oh, well, we then gave the lecture --

CLIGGETT: No, an hour before the lecture --

SCUDDER: They announced -- the government announced on the radio that the project had been suspended and as I said, not mentioning IUCN at all but well I -- I -- I -- I --

CLIGGETT: No, did you say that earlier?

SCUDDER: Yeah, I think So, --

CLIGGETT: Okay.

SCUDDER: -- it's all on tape --

CLIGGETT: Okay.

SCUDDER: -- it's all on tape. Turn the tape off for -- now for a second.

CLIGGETT: Even though --

SCUDDER: Even though the government has suspended the project they were trying to resurrect it. The president -- President [Ketumile] Masire of Botswana subsequently brought over President Mugabe --

CLIGGETT: Whew.

SCUDDER: -- of Zimbabwe in October 1994 to say, hey guys, get on with the -- the 04:08:00dam. He described his visit here as an eyeopener and was hopeful that the Botswana government would utilize the Okavango waters to develop the country. And then this article is fascinating because Mugabe is in effect -- Mugabe advocates use of Okavango waters, 'you are more important than impala, zebra, or elephants', says Zimbabwe's president in a controversial address in Maun. And then in effect he's saying he wants the Okavango to become another zero project, he wants the Okavango in effect to -- it -- it's -- and you know, [inaudible] is in effect saying that -- 'Okavango River is God's way of giving water to the people of Botswana to use for development although many people may come here to photograph the animals they go away again. Homo sapiens are more important than animals. We do not want to destroy the animals, no, no,' he said, 'but,' he 04:09:00said, 'but the dam --' then he refers to the Aswan Dam, you see, on the River Nile, he said that 'the dam which has created the world's largest manmade, enabled Egypt to sustain its x million people in wheat and rice and has enabled Egypt to become Africa's largest cotton producer.' Mugabe suggested that this was a matter which the Botswana government should look into. He pledged his support for the utilization of the potential of the Okavango River. Then the president himself, President Masire and the Minister of Finance, of Development Planning said in effect, the dream of a dam, this is 1995. So, the -- a lot of pressure was -- after they had suspended it they wanted to obviously resurrect it.

CLIGGETT: So, what's happening now that -- that -- it is, you think permanently suspended?

SCUDDER: And so, then -- wait a minute -- then I got a little pissed off. Is the 04:10:00-- is the damn tape on?

CLIGGETT: Yes.

SCUDDER: Oh.

CLIGGETT: That's okay.

SCUDDER: So, this was November 3, you see, visitor from Mugabe -- and so, then I replied in the Okavango Observer in November 1994 -- in other words this is well over a year after our -- two years after our report is out and wrote this long argument explaining why -- the project is -- you know, you put up an awful lot of time with this kind of thing -- So, all of this and then another one in -- oh, the first one is in October -- Is government pound -- punishing Maun? Speaks out on the Maun water problem. IUCN recommended no. Canceled Boro dredging. This was my reply to the president and the vice president and these various other 04:11:00people who want to go ahead with the project. Well, what's happened since? Although government will never admit it we're now heroes because [coughs] the immediate upstate -- upriver state which is Namibia has a huge water problem down in Windhoek, the capital, so, what do they want to do to solve the water problem? They want to take off water from the Okavango and move it by pipeline down into their big well field -- the Grootfontein Well Field and then move it from that on to -- to Windhoek. Well, that gave Botswana a fit because they realized that that could -- not dry up the Okavango but could have a very negative impact on the Okavango. And so, then they were able to say, hey, wait -- wait a minute, unilaterally we decided not to do the Okavango scheme, we 04:12:00suspended it because it was not in the interest of the local people. And so, what's happened now -- two things which I think will keep this project from ever occurring at least for another fifty years - you know, populations continue to increase, they may eventually have to skew the environment all around -- all around Africa just to -- to keep people going for another ten or fifteen years - but two things, one, because now Angola is coming along and -- and, you know, hopefully get moving into a -- a development period. They set up a river basin commission called the Okavango River Basin Commission which is made up of three countries --

CLIGGETT: Uh-huh.

SCUDDER: -- and have to make joint decisions which are in the interest of all three and funded by organizations like the World Bank and what-have-you and that's -- that's a plus. Another thing is that the Okavango has now been 04:13:00declared the world's largest Ramsar site and the Ramsar convention deals with wetlands of international importance for bird life, for bio diversity and what-have-you and so, since it's now an internationally important wetlands that makes it much more difficult --

CLIGGETT: Right.

SCUDDER: -- to do anything which would be destructive to it.

CLIGGETT: And your report and your activities there impacted the development of these things -- that mission --

SCUDDER: Oh, that wouldn't have happened without our report. Our report led to the Ramsar site.

CLIGGETT: I see. Was it recommended in that report?

SCUDDER: Oh, we went even further, we recommended that it become a World Heritage site --

CLIGGETT: I see.

SCUDDER: -- and a Ramsar site is just a step towards the World Heritage site. See if it -- see what Ramsar said, turn off the thing for a second.

CLIGGETT: So, you recommended in the report --

SCUDDER: That the Okavango become a World Heritage site and I think that will 04:14:00happen in time. There now is a Oka -- Okavango Research Institute based in Maun. I visited it actually just -- well, a year ago this last March and the head of it is a Scandinavian and it's got a good international staff and it is responsible for coming up with a management plan for the Okavango as the world's largest Ramsar site. And declaring it a Ramsar site is a first step towards declaring it a World Heritage site and this Okavango Research Center is all for the Okavango becoming a World Heritage Site So, I think this will come along in time. It -- it's the most logical thing for the government of Botswana to do to protect the Okavango against upstream off takes from Namibia and Angola.

CLIGGETT: Yeah, that's right. Right. Right.

SCUDDER: Okay, So, that takes care of the Okavango. Next? I think we should 04:15:00accomplish as much as we can today. Let's just go on to five and then call it quits at five.

CLIGGETT: Okay. That sounds fine. Or we'll be finished with this tape soon and we can stop again --

SCUDDER: Well, let's go on until we finish that tape.

CLIGGETT: Okay.

SCUDDER: And then there are two more tapes, right?

CLIGGETT: Yes.

SCUDDER: Yeah. And then we'll finish easily tomorrow.

CLIGGETT: Uh -- So, let's talk about the World Commission on Dams, can you talk about how -- how you got involved in the World Commission on Dams? How it was started? The role you played in creating it? What its goals were?

SCUDDER: Sure. Large dams are a very controversial topic today. There is a very strong pro-dam -- I almost all it pro-dam fundamentalism and there is a very strong anti-dam definitely fundamentalism, that is, some of these environmental organizations that don't want dams built don't want any large dams built anywhere in the world and they have very good arguments as to why there should 04:16:00be no dams and the pro-dam people have very good arguments as to why there should be dams. And the truth is somewhere in the middle. It's hard to imagine, for example, China surviving without huge inter basin transfers from the Yangtze River to the North China Plain. It's hard to imagine Los Angeles where we are right now, we are on the outskirts of Los Angeles, without getting water from the Colorado and water from the Owens Valley and water from Central and Northern California. And in some cases, you know, big dams are a legitimate water resource and energy development option. But there's also, no -- no question but that far too many dams have been made for political reasons as opposed to economic and environmental reasons. They have been made because -- you know, let's face it, they are con -- contemporary pyramids. In fact, I can remember 04:17:00President Nehru in India when -- when the Bhakra Dam was built which was one of the first main stream dams in India and that was to be a good one actually. But he said, these are the temples of modern India. And President Nasser with the Aswan High Dam made an equivalent, you know, type of comment, that's a modern pyramid. So, obviously these are fantastic emblems for a -- a political regime to -- to point to as an accomplishment. So, we call this hydropolitics. This is a term that John Waterbury in his book called Hydropolitics of the Nile, went into in in great detail as that many of these projects are not economically viable, certainly are not environmentally viable, and certainly screw up a hell of a lot of people and they're made primarily for -- for political reasons. So, anyhow, you had these pro-dam and these anti-dam people, and this was making it very difficult for organizations like the World Bank to proceed with the funding of dams which they felt were important for development purposes and as -- as a 04:18:00development option. And so, they joined forces with IUCN, the World Conservation Union, to bring together thirty-seven people carefully selected to represent all the different viewpoints --

CLIGGETT: So, the IUCN set out to establish this?

SCUDDER: No-no, World Bank and IUCN --

CLIGGETT: I see.

SCUDDER: World Bank and IUCN said, look -- see, IUCN as the world's leading conservation organization has a contract with the World Bank I think started in 1996 or something like that -- in the mid-1990s to work with the World Bank on helping the World Bank better understand environmental issues --

CLIGGETT: I see.

SCUDDER: -- and so, one of the things which came out of this relationship between the Bank and IUCN was, well, let's address the big dams' problem and let's bring together all the various viewpoints and see if we can come up with some kind of resolution. We don't know what it will be but see -- see what happens. And so, thirty-seven people were brought together on neutral territory, that is Gland Headquarters of IUCN in Switzerland. And for a number of days and 04:19:00much to everybody's surprise these thirty-seven people agreed unanimously to set a World Commission on Dams which would have a limited time span of slightly over two years, money from over fifty different organizations, both nations like Scandinavia, United States in its wisdom put up virtually nothing although we did get a little bit of money from the Bureau of Reclamation or was it the Corps of Engineers? No, it was the -- it was either the Bureau of Reclamation -- no, it was the Bureau of Reclamation to do the first global evaluation of the cost and benefits of big dams, large dams, that is any dam larger than -- in height of fifteen meters of which there are about 45,000 in the world, China and India 04:20:00being the countries with the largest number but the United States being well up there and Japan, to in effect spend two years and with a budget which eventually got to 10 million bucks from over fifty organizations. Then there was a big battle during the rest of 1997 and the first part of 1998 to decide who were going to be the commissioners on this because they had to be pro-dam people, they had to be anti-dam people, and they had to be research people. And the first big argument was over the chairman and finally everybody agreed - when I say everybody, the environmental side, and the pro-dam side - that a politician, Kader Asmal who was the Minister of Water Resources and Forestry in the government of South Africa would be a good chairman. He was one of Mandela's -- 04:21:00he was a lawyer, during the apartheid years had moved to Ireland where he eventually became a professor of law at an Irish university, had returned to South Africa after independence, a close friend of Mandela's and was appointed in the Mandela government to be Minister of Water Affairs and Forestry So, he was our chair. And twelve other people of that kind of -- of background, engineers or -- or engineer -- the leading river basin authority at the moment is the Murray and Darling River Commission in Australia which is far -- far more successful from a broad point of view than TVA. TVA was the model in the -- in the 30s and '40s and '50s but the Murray and Darling River Authority -- Commission is -- is the model today. Alright, well, Don Blackmore was the 04:22:00executive officer of that, he became a commissioner. The head of ABB which was the largest -- it's a Swedish -- Swiss country making hydro equipment, the chief executive officer of that became a -- a member. A senior scientist of environmental defense a member. The international president of OXFAM International became a member, who is also, on the board of Greenpeace --

CLIGGETT: Were you involved in building this group or were you just --

SCUDDER: No-no-no. No, in fact I was one of the thirty-seven at Gland and the understanding is that none of the thirty-seven would become members So, I assumed that I would not be a commissioner --

CLIGGETT: I see.

SCUDDER: -- because I thought that -- that -- that was sort of a common understanding that the commissioners would be drawn from people outside the thirty-seven.

CLIGGETT: I see.

SCUDDER: So, I was very surprised to find out that my name was on the list of potential commissioners. In fact, there were only two anthropologists' names on 04:23:00it, myself and Michael Cernea who was the adviser to the World Bank but obviously it didn't get very far because you couldn't very well have a -- a person from IUCN on the commission or a person from the World Bank that -- assumed to -- to be represent -- these people were -- meant to represent viewpoints but not meant to represent organizations.

CLIGGETT: I see.

SCUDDER: So, we finally came -- and then finally there was then a big fight at the end when a list of twelve -- and the commission almost collapsed before it even started and that was solved by putting Medha Patkar -- Medha Patkar is this woman who singlehandedly developed the organization resisting the Sardar Sarovar project in India. She is the water -- whose picture you've seen standing up to her neck in water as the dam -- as the reservoir has been rising and being pulled out by the police the government saying we're not going to allow you to commit suicide and she said, no-no, it's not suicide, it would be murder. Incredible person.

CLIGGETT: [chuckle] Uh-huh.

SCUDDER: So, she was put on it as a -- as a -- as a -- as a anti-dam advocate. A woman Joji Carino who had been put in jail for resisting dams. She is a indigenous person from the Philippines --

CLIGGETT: Uh-huh.

SCUDDER: -- and had been jailed because of her opposition to certain dams, she was a commissioner.

CLIGGETT: So, what was the difference between the commissioners and the thirty-seven?

SCUDDER: Oh, the thirty-seven were the people who voted unanimously to set up the commission --

CLIGGETT: I see.

SCUDDER: -- then once the vote to set her up was then, okay, who will be on it? How many commissioners will there be? Who will be chairman of it?

CLIGGETT: I see.

SCUDDER: And so, eventually thirteen people were -- were elected as commissioners, not elected but appointed commissioners. And then once Medha Patkar was on to it everybody agreed -- 'everybody' being the pro and the dam people -- anti-people and the commission went ahead. Alright, and then the commission got going. In the end of 1980 -- 1998 we set up our secretariat 04:25:00[coughs] in --

CLIGGETT: 1998?

SCUDDER: -- '98 we set up a secretariat in Cape Town because that's where Kader Asmal would be - you know, the parliament of South Africa was back and forth between Pretoria and Cape Town - with ten good professionals and they are the ones who -- who did the work in effect. And then we set up this methodology that I was talking about this morning to the engineers whereby the commission contracted out on a competitive basis a whole range of case studies, one was Kariba, one was Grand Coulee in the United States, another was the Tucurui Dam in Brazil, and so, on and so, we tried to pick cases -- we had one in Turkey -- we tried to pick cases from all around the world so, these case studies were contracted out. The one in Pakistan was done by local organizations in Pakistan. 04:26:00We then held submissions in different parts of the world where the whole commission would get together so, we had meetings in Brazil, Vietnam, Egypt, in the Czech Republic, and in various other -- other places. So, we could get submissions -- Sri Lanka -- submissions from NGO's, engineers, and what-have-you, over one thousand documents were prepared during this two-and-half-year study, over one thousand documents. Many of these, of course, were submissions.

CLIGGETT: Summarizing impacts of dams?

SCUDDER: Pro -- pro and con.

CLIGGETT: Uh-huh.

SCUDDER: Then a whole bunch of studies were contracted dealing with specific issues, for example, resettlement, social impacts, indigenous people, 04:27:00environmental impacts, financial issues, a whole range of economic issues, institutional issues, energy, water irrigation, all of these were covered in very detailed reports which were contracted out to in effect the best proposal. And it was the responsibility of the -- see, for example, here -- these were called thematic reviews and there was something like seventeen of these as I recall. Okay, here is Electricity Supply and Demand Site Management Option Review Paper prepared by contributing officers by --

CLIGGETT: Right.

SCUDDER: -- at the University of Cape Town, USA, Thailand, Siemens Germany - that's a private sector company --

CLIGGETT: Yes.

SCUDDER: -- independent consultant Canada, the University of Stockholm, the University of Sweden, and so, on -- UK so, you know, these -- these are damn good reports. These are in effect state of the art reports --

CLIGGETT: Right.

SCUDDER: -- on these I think seventeen thematic reviews. So, we had seventeen of those and therefore -- can you pick up that top shelve underneath -- underneath the -- that's it -- So, then we came out with our final report which -- our sponsor was -- was President Mandela -- or Ex-president Mandela, Dams in Development a New Framework for Decision Making: a report of the World Commission on Dams. That was December 2000 which in effect came up with a new framework for making decisions about whether or not to build dams as an option in water resource and energy development --

CLIGGETT: Okay. So, this -- the product of that temporary commission on dams --

SCUDDER: That's correct.

CLIGGETT: -- was this as -- as a report by which hopefully future planning --

SCUDDER: Right.

CLIGGETT: -- will follow the guidelines here.

SCUDDER: Right.

CLIGGETT: And this was submitted in 2000?

SCUDDER: Yeah, December 2000.

CLIGGETT: And do you know how it's being used yet?

SCUDDER: Yeah. It is being used. Certain -- certain governments [coughs] like the British government have said, we will follow the recommendations of the World Commission on Dams.

CLIGGETT: Okay.

SCUDDER: Certain export-import banks have said, we will follow recommendations of the World Commission on Dams.

CLIGGETT: Uh-huh.

SCUDDER: Certain companies, Hydro Quebec, for example, cer -- Some of the largest dam building countries have said, we will follow the recommendations of the World Commission on Dams. On the other hand, some of the biggest dam building countries have said, we will not follow the recommendations of the World Commission on Dams. China has rejected the report, India which has one of the worst records of resettlement and environmental issues in the world. One of the other worst records is the United States. India has rejected it. But there are very strong forces in India that are pro, very strong forces in China which 04:30:00are pro and so, the argument continues and is more and more -- unfortunately, one of the -- the -- the least supportive organizations has been the World Bank itself --

CLIGGETT: [chuckle] Great.

SCUDDER: -- which was responsible for -- for -- probably responsible for setting it up. But other international banks, the Asian Development Bank, the African Development Bank, the International American Development Bank have been very favorable.

CLIGGETT: Uhmhm.

SCUDDER: The -- when the commission came to an end, how do you propagate, how do you continue the dialogue?

CLIGGETT: Right.

SCUDDER: That's very important. So, initially a -- called a Dams and Development Unit, DDU, Dams and Development Unit was set up [coughs] to continue the dialogue and that was initially and has now been set under UNEP, the United Nations Environmental Program. It's too bad that it, you know, it's just environmental when -- when there social and other aspects but it's better than 04:31:00nothing. And so, now there is Unit again with funding -- international funding from Scandinavia in particular for three years to keep the dialogue going and even the World Bank has begun to have second thoughts because just in the last couple of years the World Bank has set up twenty panels to consider certain aspects of the WCD report and the two most important of those panels are the panel considering stakeholders, how do you get stakeholders involved in the decision-making process? And -- and the whole question of multiplier effects. And the Bank has hired me as a short-term consultant on both of those panels. So, I may be able to have an ongoing impact in -- in this -- this debate and the book I'm writing now which already, as I said, is about 600 single-spaced pages and I hope to finish by the end of the year I see as a follow-on report to the 04:32:00final report of the World Commission on Dams --

CLIGGETT: I see.

SCUDDER: -- because it -- what it is doing is say, okay, the World Commission on Dams way forward was the following, how do we go forward from this? What win-win situation possibilities are there for things like resettlement, for the environment, for institutions, for multiplier effects and what-have-you. So, there are a whole bunch of issues which I'm trying to -- not so, much create a -- a manual, a guide -- set of guidelines but just looking at the situation, under what conditions are large dams justified --

CLIGGETT: Uhmhm.

SCUDDER: -- and under what conditions aren't they. And if you decide to go ahead with a large dam how should you deal with the most controversial issues that the WCD identified but didn't have the time to go into details and namely resettlement and environmental, those were the two most contentious issues. But 04:33:00then there were other issues multiplier effects, existing dams, institutions, and what-have-you which I'm dealing with in great detail.

CLIGGETT: Environment and resettlement were two of the most contentious issues for the Commission?

SCUDDER: Oh no, not for the Commission. Two of the cases were dams that had the most adverse impact without justification --

CLIGGETT: Right. Okay.

SCUDDER: -- where they had resulted in very adverse irreplaceable, irreversible environmental impacts --

CLIGGETT: Right.

SCUDDER: -- and as I say the forty to eighty million people who had been resettled because of dams, a large majority of them today are worse of and that's not necessary.

CLIGGETT: Right.

SCUDDER: It's A. unacceptable and unnecessary.

CLIGGETT: Let me ask you about the process of working with the commissioners. So, there were thirteen of you?

SCUDDER: Uhmhm.

CLIGGETT: And you were the only anthropologist?

SCUDDER: Uhmhm.

CLIGGETT: And what was the process of collaborating with these people, Some pro, Some anti, [inaudible] --

SCUDDER: Well that -- that was -- that was Kader Asmal's approach which was 04:34:00probably -- perhaps was the only approach that would have worked. For the first six months or for the first three or four months we spent getting to know each other.

CLIGGETT: How --

SCUDDER: -- and getting -- and getting to like --

CLIGGETT: How --

SCUDDER: -- Having meetings --

CLIGGETT: How long were these meetings?

SCUDDER: Three -- three days where we'd all sit around and -- and, you know, talk about our backgrounds and talk about the things we were concerned about.

CLIGGETT: How often would you have those three-day meetings?

SCUDDER: Not too often. We had -- we had several meetings in South Af -- I'd say we had about eight meetings --

CLIGGETT: Over six months?

SCUDDER: -- over a two-year period.

CLIGGETT: Over two years?

SCUDDER: Yeah. But the emphasis in the first two or three meetings was before we caught onto the issues was to deal with, let's to get to know each other, hopefully let's to get to like each other and we all did end up liking each other and again, a very important selection process --

CLIGGETT: Yeah.

SCUDDER: -- the people who are willing to listen, people who are willing to be objective, people who are willing to learn, people who are willing to admit 04:35:00mistakes, and things of that nature. And so, once we got to like each other then we moved forward into the less contentious issues and we lest -- and left the contentious issue to the very end.

CLIGGETT: I see.

SCUDDER: And then by that time we had come up with ways to deal with them. And one of the major ways - again Kader Asmal was -- was -- was the person who came up with this brainstorm - well, let's look at UN conventions, these are been signed by over a hundred and twenty countries or a hundred and fifty countries in the world, let's see what these UN conventions, you know, have said about human rights, the right to development, and so, we have a whole section on these things which all of these countries in effect have signed dealing with rights. And we said, well, why shouldn't the largest development projects in the world 04:36:00which tend to be large dams and other infrastructure projects, why shouldn't they be beholden to these internationally agreed covenants? Then the next step was, well, who are the main risk takers with these dams? Well, in the past the planning has only been by governments and by donors and engineering firms and so, they look at the risk, well, what is the risk the country "A"? What's the risk to the World Bank to give a loan? What's the risk to the engineer firm to build the dam? Who has looked at the risk of the people who have to resettle? Who has looked at the risk of -- to the environment? Who has looked at the risk of the next generation? Then we go back, you see, to the real conference, sustainable development, concepts of this, well, these are things who had been agreed upon, but they are being applied.

CLIGGETT: So, you had a process of working toward mutual agreement among the 04:37:00thirteen of you --

SCUDDER: That's right.

CLIGGETT: -- about how to apply the --

SCUDDER: And -- and certain things which we had brought up in the first couple of months -- if we had brought them up there would be tremendous arguments and disagreements --

CLIGGETT: Yeah. That's right.

SCUDDER: -- but as the process evolved as like with our Okavango thing, you don't try to reach a decision or deal with your most contentious issues up front, you gradually work towards these and then if you're -- if -- if it's possible a contentious -- a -- a consensus forms and the consensus forms and you deal with the most contentious problems in this particular case - now not nec -- not -- again, you cannot say that this is the procedure for all contentious issues - but the World Commission on Dams now has become a model for -- since it worked has become a model for dealing with globally contentious issues.

CLIGGETT: Yeah. Right.

SCUDDER: And so, now rights and risks and then, of course, we were saying, okay, well now all of these people who have rights as they relate to the project and 04:38:00all of the people who are risk takers should be involved as stakeholders. So, how do you involve them as stakeholders especially as responsible stakeholders who -- who don't go into this fundamentalist screw up the process? So, all of these came in and then we were able to justify, you see, all these as US covenants and things of this nature. So, --

CLIGGETT: Good.

SCUDDER: Okay --

CLIGGETT: The tape will be over in just a few minutes So, --

SCUDDER: Okay, we'll carry on. An -- anything else you want to hit -- because we can finish up -- you know, there are a bunch of critical issues they haven't been addressed yet --

CLIGGETT: Well --

SCUDDER: -- but we can do those easily, I think, tomorrow morning.

CLIGGETT: Yeah, let's just take off with a new tape in the morning.

SCUDDER: Yeah.

[End of interview]

De Wilde, John C.; McLoughlin, Peter F.M.; Guinard, Andre; Scudder, Thayer; Maubouche, Robert. 1967. Experiences with agricultural development in tropical Africa (English). Washington, DC: World Bank. http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/688411468768308638/Experiences-with-agricultural-development-in-tropical-Africa