Wolfson College Record 2021

Personal News
caste hierarchical and food ranking systems of the northern Indian Kanya-Kubja
Brahmans in Uttar Pradesh. We began to correspond occasionally about our
teaching and research interests.
In 1979 I was given a Visiting Fellowship at Wolfson for 1980, but could only be
there from December 1979 until June 1980, because that autumn I was scheduled
to teach in Virginia. Still, my College stay allowed me to write parts of a book on
the Chamars of Lucknow. During those seven months, Nick arranged the formal
talks and presentations I gave at the Institute of Sociocultural Anthropology and in
the College. In addition, he encouraged me to meet interesting Oxford scholars,
visitors and research students. This priceless collegial gesture from my sagacious
academic friend endured for many years.
In the summer of 1986, I joined Wolfson College again as a temporary Member of
Common Room. After lunch there, I used to meet Nick and other Oxford scholars
in small-group discussions in the Common Room upstairs. I recall two of Nick’s
topics, his spirited appreciation of Marcel Mauss’s rich and original conceptualization
of ‘the social’ and of Louis Dumont’s binary – traditional versus modern –
structural explanation not only of caste hierarchy in India but of Indic civilization
as well. However, here we differed. Another time he talked about his long, careful,
comparativist pursuit of the two major epics, Homer’s Odyssey and the Mahabharata.
My short visits to Oxford continued every year until 2000 and always included
at least one lunch at Wolfson with Nick. In 1998, he mentioned he would soon
be retiring from regular teaching, but he continued to research after retirement
with books and papers appearing regularly. Wikipedia credits him with ‘seven
books and eighty articles’ by 2020, including his DPhil thesis ‘Miyapma: Traditional
Narratives of the Thulung Rai’ in 2015. This depth of knowledge and research over
the decades makes him a ‘hedgehog’, not a ‘fox’, in the poet Archilochus’ image
as elaborated by Isaiah Berlin. Nick was a polyglot sociocultural anthropologist
who ranged deeply and widely in his interests. Having learned six European
languages (to which he later added Russian, Old Norse and Old Irish), not to
mention Sanskrit and Pali for his Indic research, he was highly qualified to study
and compare Indo-European mythologies with diverse Tibeto-Burman and Nepali
socio-cultural narratives.
Nick never lost sight of a culturally comprehensive yet contextually well
differentiated and inclusive humane anthropology. But the research he found most
meaningful was to compare the Odyssey and the Mahabharata in the manner of
Georges Dumézil’s classic study. At the same time he made a bow to his Oxford
mentor in anthropology, Rodney Needham, the Needham of the early 1970s who
wrote Belief, Language and Experience (1972). I can just see Nick smiling as he
drew these intellectual connections ever more subtle, deep and wide.
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college record 2021