So, to Banbury. Your Tikopia. You once wrote, ‘Banbury will forever be the social system with which I compare all else. It is my Nuer land and my Tikopia.’

You see, that's there. You see, it was there, I really wanted to be a proper anthropologist! I think that's no longer true. And I went through Banbury fairly recently, and was quite sort of taken aback with the changes. But it was, it was expansive fieldwork. It was a full community. It was a full range, there were poor people, there were titled people. It had a working economy, an aluminium factory. While we were there General Foods moved Maxwell House Coffee and Birds Custard out of the centre of Birmingham to Banbury…

I think, this is almost metaphysical, and I don't really think I understood – I do now – the constraints that anyone who does a replication, is going to be under, if the person who wrote the first study, which is a bloody good book – a bloody good book – the constraints I was actually under, and I don't think, deep down, I didn't own those constraints, I hadn't internalised those constraints. Loads of the trouble there really was, was me not really, really understanding that you didn't have the kind of freedom to do anything you liked. It wasn't your Tikopia, it was Margaret's Tikopia. That's the mistake. Banbury was Margaret's Banbury, and I ought to have understood that…

It could have been done easily, superficially. And I think the book (Power, Persistence and Change, 1975) is astonishingly superficial – our book, not Margaret’s. Our book is astonishingly superficial.