Recorder Profile by John Thompson
If we li ve in another country we are likely to see life from a different angle. Sometimes the experience brings special insights into behaviour and all the arts that will throw fresh light on the patterns of human development as happened to Darwin, the anthropologist Evans-Pritchard, collectors of flora and fauna and even to collectors of folk song. When Maud Karpeles and Cecil Sharp explored the isolated mountain area of the Appalachians in America they discovered a source of folk song that had closer parallels with the England, Ireland and Scotland of the seventeenth-century than with the twentieth. This was their richest find. On another level, when the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss left France to take up the chair of sociology in the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil he came into contact with the Indian population of the interior. The direction of his life changed. He began to study primitive culture, especially their modes of thought and behaviour and was able to use these i...