![]() He was a mentor: generous, supportive and tolerant. Thereafter we met sporadically at meetings (in Prague and Cracow as well as Canterbury and London). Soon after this, he was an external adviser to the committee which appointed me to the chair in social anthropology at the University of Kent. However, my main recollection of those tumultuous years is sipping red wine and watching the 1990 World Cup on television at his house in Clarendon Street. In 1989–1991 his attention was focused on the USSR (following his year in Moscow) and I was writing about Hungary. ![]() Ernest enjoyed visiting my college for lunch because it was smaller and felt cosier than his own. Though we never taught courses together, we did share supervision responsibilities for a few graduate students. He was a very egalitarian Head of Department and we interacted as colleagues during some seven years. ![]() ![]() In 1984, recently appointed to succeed Jack Goody as William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology, Ernest participated in the committee that appointed me to an assistant lectureship. He was the external examiner of my PhD in 1979. They differed greatly in both content and style from any other lectures I attended. ![]() Disclosure: my first encounter with Ernest Gellner was in the mid-1970s when he was invited by Jack Goody to give lectures on ‘Rationality’ in the Department of Social Anthropology in Cambridge. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |